Multisensory music festivals making live performances enjoyable for the Deaf

Sencity is a multisensory music festival designed from Deaf perspectives. It co-creates with artists with hearing disabilities and uses sign language, lights, vibrations, scents and taste so everyone can share the live experience. By 2025 it reached 2,000 visitors in 17+ countries.

Stichting Possibilize, a disability-led NGO based in Utrecht, organizes the Sencity Festival, an immersive and inclusive music event designed by and for people with hearing impairments. The festival incorporates sensory elements such as light, scent, taste, vibration, and sign language interpretation, enabling audiences with and without disabilities to share the same experience. By 2025, Sencity had been adopted in over 17 countries on 5 continents worldwide.

Problems Targeted

Music festivals exclude audiences with hearing disabilities by focusing on sound alone, lacking creative accessibility and representation in cultural production.

Solution, Innovation and Impact

Sencity reimagines music festivals by designing them from the perspective of Deaf people. Instead of adding isolated adaptations, events are conceived as multisensory experiences co-created with artists with hearing disabilities, ensuring representation in both content and leadership. Songs are interpreted through sign language, facial expression, and movement, while ‘sensorial choreography’ translates sound into synchronized lights, vibrating floors, digital wind, taste sensations, and an aroma-jockey. This enables audiences with and without hearing disabilities to share the same experience. Key team members also provide training and consultancy to other arts organizations, showing leadership beyond festivals. Although Sencity may look like an event for Deaf people, it is equally for hearing audiences, proving how inspiring accessibility can be. The result is a festival more engaging than regular clubs or concerts. By 2025 over 17 countries on five continents had hosted Sencity editions, with 2,000 visitors, including 1,200 with hearing disabilities.

Funding, Outlook and Transferability

Sencity is funded through a mix of public subsidies, private sponsorship, and low-cost ticketing, thus ensuring affordability. Depending on scale and available resources, festival budgets vary from €2,000 to €300,000. In the Netherlands, Sencity is working with Possibilize, an organizing and events company. The events abroad are organized by local organizations (for example, a local deaf association) through a license system. In addition, the Sencity team has developed toolkits and subtitled podcasts that are available for free (through the Revelland platform), and regularly presents at relevant conferences such as ESNS (Netherlands), Reeperbahn (Germany), and Primavera (Spain). (#ZeroCall26)

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