One of the wildly cool tools available at Empac, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: “The wave system, a modular array of more than 500 speakers, uses acoustical trickery to reproduce organic sounds with unusually high fidelity. It can also “place” (and seem to move, quickly) those eerily lifelike tones at specific coordinates. Any but the most superficial kind of explanation of how this is possible tends to involve high math (like Bessel functions). But if you had to describe the effect, you might go for trippy and exciting.”