# Lab 2: Shape an Immersive Mix With Your Hands and Voice

> Mix with gestures, voice and head movement in the live Spatial9 Interactive Mode, then explore emotion and bio-adaptive spatial audio previews.

Web page: https://spatial9.ai/blog/academy-lab-interactive-spatial-mixing
Author: Spatial9 Team
Published: 2026-10-04. Updated: 2026-10-04.

## Key takeaways
- Interactive Mode lets you pick at most two instruments or groups for hand control, following the on-screen rule Open = Play, Close = Mute.
- Voice Control accepts commands such as add vocals and bass, enable all drums, remove synths and clear all, and saying a stem name selects that stem.
- Head Movement Reverb Control adds less reverb for slow head movements and more for fast ones, which changes how close the chosen instrument feels.
- The Bio-Adaptive Beta Preview works with a heart-rate monitor or a simulator and offers four behaviors named Anchor, Bloom, Shell and Breath.

In this lesson: You will use Interactive Mode in the Spatial9 music room to play and mute instruments with your hands, switch groups on and off with your voice, and control reverb with head movement. Then you will explore two Beta Previews that hint at a future of adaptive, personalized spatial audio.

For most of audio history, mixing has meant sitting still. You face a console or a screen, you reach for a fader, and you move it a few millimeters. The music changes, but your body barely does.

What if the mix responded to an open hand? To a spoken sentence? To the speed of a turn of your head? Suddenly mixing stops looking like data entry and starts looking like performance. You are no longer just adjusting sound. You are playing the space.

In Lab 1 you built a listening method. In this lab you put that method to work while you move. It is the second hands-on lab in Spatial9 Academy, and it is the most playful one. Enjoy it.


## What you will learn

- How Interactive Mode maps hands, voice and head movement to changes in a 3D mix.
- How to choose up to two instruments or groups for hand control and why that limit helps you focus.
- How the valence and arousal model describes emotion, and how it can drive spatial behavior.
- What the Emotion-Driven and Bio-Adaptive Beta Previews suggest about personalized audio.
- How to think critically about mixing as performance, privacy and accessibility.

The rest of this lesson is free with a Spatial9 account: https://spatial9.ai/blog/academy-lab-interactive-spatial-mixing