Symphonies in space: orchestras embrace virtual reality
[Philip Lelyveld comment: These examples are simple pairings of old media ideas, but the experimentation with classical musicians will lead to new experiences and the evolution of the language of VR.]
At Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on Saturday, the emerging technology took New Yorkers inside the Orion Nebula, the gaseous cloud of dust and evolving stars some 1,500 light years away. The VR installation was part of the Hubble Cantata, an hour-long composition for orchestra, 100-voice chorus, soloists and narration, by composer Paola Prestini and librettist Royce Vavrek.
Staged at the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn concert series, the cantata’s climatic moment came in its last five minutes, when audience members were cued to slip their phones into free cardboard VR headsets that were distributed at the gates. As the narrator, astrophysicist Mario Livio, poetically described the life and death of stars, attendees shifted in their seats, craned their necks and even stood to view the three-dimensional renderings of Hubble photographs, directed by Eliza McNitt.
Last year the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in Australia hired Jumpgate, an Australian VR studio, to create a stage-view, 360-degree performance video of Sibelius’s Finlandia. Created using a rig of 16 GoPro cameras in front of conductor Guy Noble, the video has been distributed through YouTube and Facebook (it can be viewed using a headset or on a desktop computer).
Similar in concept is a 360-degree rehearsal film of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony created by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra with the Canadian studio VR Cinematic.
Last year the American violinist Tim Fain worked with Jessica Brillhart, a VR film-maker at Google, on the 360-degree short film, Resonance. The vaguely surreal film shows Fain performing an original composition against several backdrops, including a graffiti-tagged empty warehouse, a barnyard and a church, with directional sound guiding the viewer through each new space. Filmed using Jump, a new camera rig intended to create a greater sense of depth, it has drawn over 420,000 views since November.