Tennessee’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival has unveiled an Infinity Stage for its 2025 edition, touted as the “world’s largest” 360° live music experience.

Backed by UK-based music technology company Polygon Live, the new venture aims to deliver a fully immersive experience for attendees with speakers positioned overhead and around the hemispherical stage.

“Our offering, however, is not just about sound. It’s designed to tap into almost every sense: sound, sight, scent and touch. It’s a multisensory environment that stimulates and amazes, and keeps our audiences coming back for more,” explains Polygon.

Featuring “spatialised sound and synchronised lights,” the structure will be erected alongside five pre-existing stages – three main and two tents – in the main festival area, known as Centeroo.

Dedicated programming is expected for the stage, with a lineup announcement expected this week.

Infinity Live is reportedly a North American first, with Polygon Live staging iterations across Asia

The four-day pop/rock festival, which welcomed 70,000 people last year, is set to return to Manchester, Tennessee for its 22nd edition from 12-15 June. Bonnaroo is produced by Superfly Presents, which also produces San Francisco’s Outside Lands Music Festival, and AC Entertainment.

Infinity Live is reportedly a North American first, with Polygon Live having staged iterations at Thailand’s Wonderfruit Festival and Singapore’s AFTER 2049, an electronic music event held before the country’s Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Polygon Live will also launch a bespoke three-day festival in London this May, dubbed the UK’s “largest outdoor spatial audio festival”.

Polygon Live LDN will be the first event to utilise Polygon Productions’ dual-dome design, with each stage boasting “five times the speakers a stage of similar size would use”, said Polygon during its December announcement.

The inaugural edition is set for 2-4 May 2025 at Crystal Palace Park and will include performances by Arooj Aftab, Gold Panda, Halina Rice, and Jon Hopkins.

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Polygon, a UK-based start-up which claims to have invented “the world’s first fully immersive 3D 360° sound stage”, will officially launch Polygon Live at Wonderfruit festival in Thailand next month.

Designed around an L-Acoustics processor, the Polygon Live arena “changes the status quo” by giving performers – who are first flown to Polygon’s London office to ‘pre-spatialise’ their music – “the ability to perfectly spatialise sounds within, but also to physically move sounds around, a space”, putting the fan at the centre of immersive surround-sound experience.

Christian Heil, CEO and founder of L-Acoustics, says: “Sound is by definition a spatialised medium. It’s how the human species naturally experiences sound: detailed, multidimensional and localised. Today at concerts we should instead be asking, ‘Why is the sound not spatialised?’ Until recently, the answer to this question was because we didn’t have a user-friendly and cost-effective ecosystem to reproduce natural, 3D sound.”

“Polygon and Wonderfruit have showcased L-ISA technology since 2017 and can be considered pioneers in the use of spatialised sound in the electronic and dance music world,” Heil adds. “EDM is a thrilling application for L-ISA because the genre does not tie the physical localisation of sound to a known and recognisable instrument such as a violin or a drum kit. This opens up tremendous freedom to have sound travel, shapeshift and ricochet, independently of where the sound is made.

“Today at concerts we should instead be asking, ‘Why is the sound not spatialised?’”

“L-ISA becomes a kind of instrument, enveloping fans in entirely new sensations and perceptions. It’s exciting and Polygon is at the forefront of a sonic and creative revolution that is only just beginning to unfold.”

Polygon CEO Nico Elliott adds: “After many years researching 3D sound we are excited to officially launch Polygon Live. We believe that Polygon will redefine how live music is experienced and set a new benchmark for the industry.”

At Wonderfruit this year, Polygon Live will take the form of a bamboo stage designed by lighting designer/architect Visual Systems, also featuring scent dispersion, pyrotechnics and tubed LED lighting.

The Polygon Live line-up at Wonderfruit includes leading electronic musicians and DJs including Be Svendsen, Luis Rosenberg, Viken Arman Alban Endlos, Martha Van Straaten and Matanza.

Wonderfruit 2019 takes place from 12 to 16 December at Siam Country Club in Pattaya, Chonburi.

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