Adriana Brito Matos on a remarkable show transporting listeners to the Amazon jungle

Being Brazilian, I was looking forward to see or should I say , to hear The Encounter.

The prospect of being able to hear the sounds of Amazon Forest was something I couldn't resist. Like every Brazilian child, I learnt at school about the Amazon rainforest and its immerse biodiversity through photos and text books. But being able to be transported there, using high technology, was something I never expected.

In The Encounter, Loren McIntyre encounters a tribe who previously never had any contact with the outside world.

Waiting for the audience to eargerly test their headphones, I wondered how Simon Mc Burney could make it all real for me. How could he, with a minimalist stage consisting with one desk, one an anechoic chamber and a microphone with a piece of kit called a binaural head, be able to take me from the middle of Oxford straight to the hot, humid Brazilian jungle?

Simon begins by asking the audience to turn their mobile phones off. He then engages us by talking about the enormous personal data that we all carry in our phones daily.

The expectations are high. The audience is eager to listen carefully and not miss anything - sound or comment.

He tells us about the Binaural Head device and how it will help him deliver an intimate experience. He shows us in detail how it works, moving to one side of the standing microphone he can deliver the sound to his chosen side.

He plays with sounds, keeping one sound in our left year, but another in the right.

He layers different sounds and creates a wide range of audio samples, using for example a soft whispering voice to represent a character's thought.

Finally, after a very detailed, perhaps over-long, technical explanation of the technology on stage, he begins...

The sound of an airplane flying over the rainforest enters my mind. I close my eyes. Soon I can hear the sounds of birds and other animals echoing beyond.

A persistent sound of mosquitoes is added. The sound of water running down the River Amazon let us know we have arrived.

The plane has landed.

As my senses starts to be challenged I feel without any doubt that this is the intimate experience I was hoping for.

A triumph then.