What Music they Make

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, released in 1897, has been an immensely popular cultural text and a seminal work in the horror genre. This has seen it recreated on stage and screen and inspired many other adaptations and new imaginings across literature, stage and screen media. However, within this canon there is a paucity of radio and audio drama adaptations of the original novel beyond the audio book format which tends to be limited in sound treatment including music, not to mention lacking ambisonic, immersive audio for the listener.

The authors/creators will present an audio-visual experience that will bring the famous Dracula story to life using carefully crafted soundscapes recreating pivotal segments from the book using 360 immersive sound and visual clues to spark the listener’s imagination and transport them back in time and space to the locations in the novel.

The circa twenty-minute continuous audio piece will involve little to no dialogue and include locations such as Dracula’s eerie castle in Transylvania and haunted graveyards using all original audio-visual content to adapt the original text into this unique multimedia experience.

This is an artistic collaboration involving creative practitioners across the School of Arts at the University of Derby involving music composition, audio production, dramaturgy and immersive audio technology, as art merges with technology to place the listener in the centre of the story and bring Dracula back to life in this truly chilling sonic experience.