Night Song: Patterns of Perception

Marshmallow Laser Feast are bringing Night Song: Patterns of Perception to the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford, running from 9 April to 24 April 2027. It's an immersive multisensory audiovisual installation that looks at how the human brain understands sound, and it's taking over the Black Box for the duration.

The experience is built around a single nightingale's song. You follow its waves of sound on a nighttime journey that opens up our perceptual relationship with hearing and our entanglement with the more-than-human world. The artists describe it as travelling inside the brain to witness the journey of birdsong, combining spatial audio, moving image, and neuroscience to show how a sound becomes a perception.

It's a collaboration between the multi-award-winning experiential collective Marshmallow Laser Feast and spatial sound artist James Bulley. They didn't work alone, either: the piece was developed with University of Oxford professors Andrew King, Fiona Stafford, Morten Kringelbach, and Anil Seth, along with the philosopher David Abram. Marshmallow Laser Feast are the Cultural Fellows 2026/27 at the Schwarzman Centre, and Night Song sits within the centre's Planetary Health theme.

There are multiple performances daily from 10:00 to 20:00, so you can fit it in whenever suits you across the two-and-a-half weeks. A couple of practical things to keep in mind: the age guidance is 12+, and there may be periods of darkness throughout.