Virtual Music: A new genre of sonic arts practice

Abstract

Virtual reality systems offer users access to the real, the not-yet real and the impossible – a unique set of capabilities that has generated an exponential surge in user engagement across a wide range of industries and disciplines. While musical implementations of VR technology, separate and distinct from content that uses music in an auxiliary role, remains a comparatively small field of artistic practice, recent projects such as Bjork’s Vulnicura VR, Michael van der Aa’s Eight and my own work Pillars of Introspection, demonstrate a slow but steady adoption of VR technology by music creators. The practice of composing musical experiences for VR draws heavily from techniques developed in the fields of visual music, interactive music and installation, yet also adds new layers of complexity, new aesthetic and technical considerations and requires new methods of presentation. Given these differences with established fields of sonic arts practice, it seems pertinent to evaluate what compositional language exists for VR creation and how it may continue to be developed. Further from this, the question must be asked – if the medium of VR requires that composers adopt new techniques, learn new rules and a new musical language, then does this constitute the first stirrings of a new genre of sonic arts practice; that of virtual music? In this thesis I examine the parallels between music in VR and established genres of sonic arts, I also describe areas of divergence from these genres and the unique properties of virtual reality itself. After contextualising music in VR within the wider sonic arts field, I present a definition of this practice and propose the terminology virtual music to describe works that fit with this definition. Finally, I examine a selection of my own studies and works and, through phenomenological observations on my own compositional practice, propose a set of techniques that may be utilised by other composers.