Archive 2017: Music in Virtual Reality

Use an old idea.

— Oblique Strategies — Eno & Schmidt

An early experiment in creating a virtual environment specifically designed around music and performance. Virtual instruments and stages built in Unity and Cinema4D, playable and explorable through Google Cardboard on iOS.

The speakers visible in the virtual space are not decorative — each one represents a channel in a multichannel audio setup, visualising the spatial positioning of specific parts of the mix. As you move through the environment, the audio sources shift in relation to your position and head orientation, creating a spatial audio experience that maps directly onto the physical layout of the speakers in the scene.

This approach treats the virtual space as an acoustic space: sound has a location, a direction, and a distance. The result is closer to being inside a live mix than listening to a stereo recording.