
Chambers of Awe & Laura Inserra
present
QUALIA
Experience the Magic... Embrace the Mystery…
A full-dome film experience combining the transformative powers of sound, ancient wisdom traditions, and cutting-edge technology to awaken your senses, deepen your connection with nature, and inspire inner transformation.
Written, Performed & Directed by Laura Inserra
February 21st, 2025 at 6 PM & 7:15 PM
Planetarium of Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland
March 2nd, 2025 at 6 PM
Premiere at the Planetarium of Fiske in Boulder
QUALIA is an immersive sound and visual journey into the magic of life. It invites you to transcend space and time, dissolve boundaries, and reconnect with the deeper layers of your being. Through music and imagery, QUALIA creates a space where you become the creator of your own experience, perceiving a reality that is uniquely yours.
The word qualia refers to the unique, subjective experiences each of us has—the colors we see, the emotions we feel, the meaning we assign to the world around us. It reminds us that reality is not something outside of us, but something we co-create within.
A full-dome film experience designed for planetariums, QUALIA takes you on a journey through the 5 Elements – Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Space – as a pathway into grounding, connecting, envisioning, harmonizing, and integrating.
The music is an offering of sound as medicine, created to connect deeply with ourselves, the natural world, and the larger mystery of life. Composed and performed by sound alchemist Laura Inserra, featuring ceremonial instruments that have been used for centuries in sacred traditions around the world. The visuals, drawn from real-world imagery and scientific data, offer a reverent homage to the beauty and authenticity of what is real in a time when so much around us is simulated.
QUALIA invites you to step beyond the ordinary and into a place of awe and wonder. It is up to you to experience QUALIA as a transformative journey, an immersion into beauty, a booster for creativity, a physical, mental, and emotional release, or a joyful and meaningful time to share with your friends and beloved ones.
This is your QUALIA. Let your journey begin...
Director Statement
Through the Chambers of AWE productions, I craft environments where sound becomes an experience and a conduit for healing and self-discovery. By augmenting the natural harmonics of rare instruments—from Zapotec clay flutes to the Hang—with advanced audio technologies, I create rich tapestries of resonance that engage the body, mind, and spirit. These immersive sound experiences invite participants to journey beyond the ordinary, accessing states of deep relaxation and expanded consciousness.
Qualia is my invitation to step into a sacred space—a Chamber of Awe—where the boundaries between the tangible and transcendent dissolve, offering a canvas for the mind, body, and soul to connect with the profound magic of existence.
Guided by the elemental forces of Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Space, Qualia empowers each person to become the creator of their unique experience, perceiving the world through the lens of their own qualia—those subjective, ineffable sensations that make life extraordinary.
The music of Qualia lies at the heart of the experience. The majority of the musical score is based on a one-hour sound journey I created for groundbreaking research conducted by Johns Hopkins University, exploring the therapeutic potential of music in expanding consciousness and enhancing well-being.
Through the addition of 360º visuals, I aim to reconnect individuals with the natural world and the ancestral wisdom within us all, fostering connection, transformation, and awe. My hope is to inspire a renewed sense of wonder and interconnectedness, reminding us of the beauty and magic inherent in the human experience.
My artistic vision is rooted in the belief that music is a universal language capable of transcending the boundaries of perception. Through Qualia, I hope to inspire audiences to rediscover the beauty that lies within and all around us, sparking ripples of harmony and consciousness in our individual and collective journey.
It is up to you to experience Qualia as a transformative journey, or an immersion into beauty, a booster for creativity, a physical, mental, and emotional release, or a joyful and meaningful time to share with your friends and beloved ones.
This is about your Qualia. Let your journey begin…

Chambers of AWE present Winter Solstice Celebration
A live full-dome show hosted at the Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland
Video interview with Laura Inserra

Laura Inserra
Director, Composer and Producer
Laura Inserra is a world-renowned leader in sound healing - a sound alchemist, multi-instrumentalist, educator, and multimedia producer. She lives and creates at the confluence of global music, ancient wisdom traditions, and cutting-edge technology.
Laura grew up in Sicily and has been exploring the power of sound since her youth. She has decades of worldwide industry experience in soundtrack and sound design for movies, performing arts, and site-specific installations, as well as immersive multidisciplinary productions.
Laura plays hundreds of rare ancient and modern instruments from around the world - Zapotec clay flutes, Mongolian jaw harp, Tibetan bowls, Laotian khen, Australian didgeridoo, African djembe, various shamanic drums, numerous percussions, and unique custom-made instruments, including many made by her.
Combining her intimate knowledge of music with her spiritual studies, Laura developed MetaMusic Healing, gaining recognition in the NYT bestseller "Your Brain on Art" by Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen. Her work has been chosen by Johns Hopkins for a research project around the benefit of music, aiming to uncover how music can amplify the therapeutic effects of psychedelics, enhance well-being, and expand our understanding of consciousness.
Laura conducts transformative leadership retreats and corporate programs with senior executive teams of companies such as Google X, Walmart, and Synergos. She is also actively engaged in creating immersive experiences and as a public speaker in the most cutting-edge conferences such as BrainMind, MAPS, and Wisdom 2.0
Music Awakens what is Asleep in Us
Founded by Laura Inserra, Chambers of AWE is a mission-driven production company rooted in decades of experience in immersive productions, cross-cultural studies, and healing practices.
Our passion is to help overcome the growing imbalance between humans and nature, our loss of community, and detachment from ancient wisdom.
We create immersive and transformative experiences designed to enhance profound shifts of consciousness, deepen our relationship with nature, and facilitate inner transformation and healing.
At the heart of these productions is the use of ceremonial instruments from ancient traditions and unique modern craftsmanship. These instruments are intentionally crafted to support altered states of consciousness, provide access to inner guidance, and foster a sense of communal connection.
We utilize cutting-edge technology to augment some of these natural sources of sound, creating immersive environments rich in frequencies and resonances that can be felt through our bones, cells, and other meta-sensory receptors. In these settings, music becomes an embodied experience.
Our productions feature 360º visuals and CGI content rooted in ancient cross-cultural wisdom and human-made art. The encompassing imagery adds a deeper layer of introspection, offering a lens that reveals what our naked eyes alone cannot perceive. This allows us to see the vastness of reality with new eyes, seeing ordinary life in extraordinary ways.

Immersive Art versus Experiential Art
An article by Laura Inserra
I’ve been reflecting a lot on the difference between immersive entertainment and experiential art or music. There’s no question that nowadays immersive entertainment is the new trend. And yet, there is a clear distinction between experiences designed merely to stimulate and those designed to transform and shift people's consciousness.
Immersive productions, while captivating, often leave participants overwhelmed by an overload of sensory input, offering little more than momentary stimulation. But what happens when we shift from immersive to experiential art? This is where the conversation about Qualia begins.
Experiential art—or experiential music—transcends the passive consumption of stimuli. It invites interaction, creating an exchange between the art and the participant. This exchange has the potential to leave a lasting imprint, facilitating transformation that extends beyond the event itself. Participants don’t just observe or absorb; they engage, interact, and carry with them the profound shifts sparked by the experience.
At its core, this is about awe. True awe comes from experiencing something bigger than oneself, not as a concept or an abstraction, but as an integrated, holistic reality. When your whole system—body, mind, and spirit—is immersed in the awareness of a greater interconnectedness, a profound shift occurs. This shift is what we call transformation, an awakening to new dimensions of existence and self-awareness.
Immersive experiences like Qualia aim to activate dormant abilities within us. In our daily lives, surrounded by stimuli that often reduce our reality to a two-dimensional plane, we lose touch with the expansive, multi-dimensional nature of existence. Experiential art reawakens these abilities, allowing us to perceive reality in richer, fuller ways—what some may call fourth or fifth-dimensional awareness. Through awe-inducing experiences, music, and art, we access a new consciousness, a heightened awareness that brings about healing and transformation.
Qualia is more than a planetarium show; it’s an invitation to engage with the non-quantifiable aspects of experience—those moments that cannot be measured or reduced to data. Qualia refers to the subjective, ineffable sensations that define the uniqueness of our reality. It’s the feeling of love when you gaze at your child, the deep resonance when you stand before a breathtaking landscape, or the connection you feel to the universe through music or art. These experiences defy measurement yet define the essence of being human.
Qualia also draws from ancient traditions and philosophies. In the Vedic tradition, the concept of Maya describes the veil of illusion that obscures the true nature of reality. Maya isn’t about denying reality but recognizing that what we perceive is shaped by our senses and conditioned by our minds. Below this veil lies Lila, the play of life—the unfolding, ever-changing dance of the universe. Qualia seeks to peel back this veil, revealing the interconnected dance of existence while honoring the beauty and significance of subjective experience.
Reality is deeply personal and subjective. Each person’s perception is unique, shaped by their own senses, history, and consciousness. This recognition brings dignity to individual experience while also highlighting our collective interdependence. We are not isolated beings; we are part of an intricate web of influence and resonance. As ancient wisdom suggests, our inner harmony contributes to the harmony of the whole.
Qualia encourages us to recognize the power we have to influence our inner environment and, by extension, the collective reality. It reminds us that transformation begins within. By changing how we perceive and experience reality, we become tuning forks, radiating clarity and harmony that ripple outward, influencing the greater whole. This is the power of experiential art: it fosters personal transformation that becomes a catalyst for collective evolution.
The ultimate aim of Qualia is to inspire participants to embrace their unique gifts and contributions. Each of us holds a one-of-a-kind presence, an innate gift, a role in the unfolding play of life. By engaging with the awe and wonder of existence through experiential art, we rediscover our agency and our responsibility to contribute to the flourishing of our collective journey.
Qualia is an invitation to step into the expansive, interconnected dance of life. It’s an opportunity to awaken to the transformative power of awe, to engage with the non-quantifiable essence of experience, and to carry this newfound awareness into the world. Through Qualia, we honor the beauty of individual experience while celebrating our shared humanity, sparking ripples of harmony and consciousness that extend far beyond the event itself.


Bringing AWE Back to Us
A key feature of Chambers of AWE is the use of audio and video field recordings made in sacred places in the world, which help us rebalance our relationship with nature and reconnect to the wisdom of previous civilizations.
In our modern times we live isolated, and in an environment filled with electronic sounds and compressed digital frequencies, which have drastically reduced the emergent properties of sound and music.
In nature nothing is isolated or compressed therefore acoustic sources of sound have a much richer spectrum of frequencies, harmonics, and textures which activate our brain and body in multidimensional ways. Chambers of AWE bring back ancient sounds and lost frequencies as sources of physical, mental, and spiritual nourishment.
Participants Report
“a sense of inner peace never experienced before”
“physical and emotional pain release”
“mental clarity”
“inner guidance”
“a boost of creativity“
“a connection to the ancestors“
“a feeling of being at home“
“a life transforming experience”
“a psychedelic journey without medicine“
“a clear felt experience that all is interconnected“
“a renewed relationship with nature”

Chambers of AWE was staged world premiere at
Prague Congress Center - Czech Republic
Oct. 30 - Nov. 2, 2018
Devcon is the annual Ethereum conference for designers, developers, researchers and artists. The Ethereum Foundation hosts Devcon to educate and empower our community to build decentralized applications, and to bring Ethereum protocols, tools, and culture to the world.
This is a conference for builders: designers, UX researchers, smart contract devs, blockchain researchers, client implementers, test engineers, infrastructure operators, community organizers, and even artists in the community.
Behind the Scenes of Chambers Of AWE
An Interview with Laura Inserra during the world premier performed in Prague for DevCon4, the Ethereum Foundation's conference 2018.

Using Music & Cutting Edge Technology for
Immersive & Transformative Experiences
Chambers of AWE was premiered in 2018 in Prague during a large cryptocurrency conference, when Laura transformed for four days a forum hall into a decompression room, creating a sound and lighting reactive installation. Participants were entering an invisible but palpable 60 foot diameter sphere of sound created by an ambisonic system of 16 speakers and 4 subwoofers.
Laura and her live set was in the center of the sphere with 8 mics, each one connected to 2 speakers, plus 2 mics connected to the whole sound system. This allowed her to map and create live sound architectures in addition to her pre-recorded tracks.
The ongoing intertwined pre-recorded and live music created a striking immersive sound environment. In addition, she offered twice a day guided immersive sound experiences.
An Article by Michael Ellsberg
Why do the most forward-thinking tech conferences
hire Laura Inserra to create their decompression rooms?
Heading into the 2020s, the most forward-looking corporate conferences create decompression lounges where attendees can relax and recharge for a few minutes before diving back in headlong to the intensity and bustle of the conference. However, most decompression lounges, are paltry affairs with perhaps a little ambient music playing off an iPod, a tea station, and some diffused lights.
At DevCon4, the main annual meeting for the Ethereum community, the Foundation wanted something more immersive, more artistic, and frankly, more decompressive and recharging. The foundation wanted participants not just to have a relaxing and restorative experience, but one that would also uplift them, and bring them into deeper resonance with their bodies - thus getting more in touch with their creative potential. That’s why the Ethereum Foundation hired sound alchemist Laura Inserra, creator of Chambers of AWE (Acoustic Waves Emergence).