Underwater playtest

About Underwater

A live concert you can play

Underwater is a musical world you can swim around in. You are a fish in a living reef: coral that pulses with colour, whales passing overhead, and music coming from everywhere at once. Explore on your own whenever you like, or join a live performance and share the water with other players and with a real audience in a real room.

Game features

• Choose your fish and swim
• Meet other players in the water, in real time
• Talk in fish: calls, clicks and floating hearts
• Gather food, trade playful water shots, or just watch
• Reef sound recorded in the real ocean, in 3D
• Live performances on scheduled dates
• Keyboard, mouse or controller

Recorded in the real ocean

Before any of this existed, we built a rig and took it diving: four hydrophones in a spatial array, a recorder in a waterproof case, and a lot of patience. The reefs were in Bali, Lanyu, Maui and Norfolk. What came back is the entire sound of the work — coral crackling like static, fish whooping and grunting, sea urchins scraping the rock, whales singing across open water.

An ocean made of light

Nothing here is drawn by hand. The reef is built from millions of points of light, arranged into coral, whales and drifting gardens, then set in motion. Swim close and a shape falls apart into dots. Drift back and it becomes something you recognise.

Everything answers the sound: coral pulses, shapes dissolve, a school of fish scatters and comes back together. Some of the landscapes began as video — filmed, and generated with AI — and were rebuilt into 3D worlds you can move through.

Two artists, one ocean

Underwater is made by two people. Ian Gallagher builds the game: the world, the visuals and the systems that keep it running. An-Ting makes the music, and works alongside him to shape the whole thing. Neither half is decoration for the other: the music is shaped by what the reef can do, and the reef is shaped by what the music does. It takes a producer, a few good advisors and a great deal of wiring to hold it together.

Ian Gallagher

Ian Gallagher studied Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh and completed a PhD in Complex Systems at Manchester. He makes real-time 3D worlds, generative visuals and the tools that hold a live show together, with work presented at the East Kowloon Cultural Centre in Hong Kong. He is a core contributor to the open-source generative AI arts community.

An-Ting

An-Ting 安婷 is a composer and electronic musician, described by NOTION as "the one-to-watch in the world of composing". She records the ocean with a hydrophone and writes for it: spatial electronics, field recordings and Chinese verse, performed live from the venue on the night. She holds a degree in Chemistry from National Taiwan University and a PhD in performance from the Royal Academy of Music.

Lost Communications

Lost Communications is the studio Ian and An-Ting founded together in 2026, to explore non-human communication. The name started as a work. Lost Communications 失絡之聲 turned birdsong from five countries into dark electronic soundscapes, and toured from Taipei and Hong Kong to Norfolk & Norwich Festival and FILE Festival in Brazil. Before it, every dollar (2021) won Arts Council England's Digital Culture Award for Storytelling, and HOME X (2023) premiered at the Barbican and was nominated for a UK Theatre Award. Both are now Senior Research Fellows at Norwich University of the Arts.

Come for a swim. Stay for the music.

With thanks

Underwater is supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and supported by Immersive Arts, Norwich University of the Arts and The Space. Co-commissioned by Oxford Contemporary Music. Spatial audio supported by the Institute for Creative Technology at Norwich University of the Arts, Aaron Holloway-Nahum and Southby Productions.

From the game's Steam page.