The virtual reality section at last month’s AES Show in L.A. was in an appropriate location, on a second-level connecting walkway between halls in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Not just because nearby Hollywood is its own alternative universe, but because VR itself occupies its own media mezzanine tier at the moment, in between reality and fantasy, and between how we see the world now and how we might see it — and us — in the future. It was also separate from the growing live sound contingent at the show, where the AES has now come, somewhat reluctantly but inevitably, to embrace the fact that recordings are no longer the center of music’s universe.
I met Josh Antonuccio there. He’s the director of the Immersive Media Initiative at Ohio University’s Scripps College of Communication School of Media Arts and Studies, where he’s helping nudge VR into actual reality. And an important part of that is how it will interact with live music. Right now, there’s live music the way we currently experience it. A long time ago, I pronounced in print that the word “analog” came along to describe the world before digital, simply because the world before we had digital didn’t need a name — like snow for Eskimos, it just was. We may need to make that same lexicographical leap for live music once VR gets proper hold of it.
The VR On Stage
We’re on the verge of live-streaming music, a proposition that already has a number of commercial ventures behind it. But live streaming still restricts us to a single point of view: that of the cameras and the video switcher and, ultimately, the director.
But a performance by Courtney Barnett (an Australian punker who reminds one of an early-on, stripped-down Green Day) at the Nelsonville Music Festival this summer reveals how VR can put the viewer on stage with the band, allowing a 360-degree perspective to be manipulated remotely and available discretely, with each viewer able to control perspective according to his or her tastes.
This is VR’s promise: to upend the traditional relationship between performer and audience. Antonuccio emphasizes that a VR experience will not replace being there, but that it will offer an alternative presence that can exist alongside an actual physical presence in a venue, while also offering those that couldn’t make it, or as in the words of a 1970’s Bell Telephone commercial, “the next best thing to being there.”
“If, for instance, you couldn’t get to Coachella,” Antonuccio says, noting that the Indio, CA festival this year offered VR views of certain stages for the first time, “you could still get close to the artists you wanted to see. Maybe closer than you would have if you had been there.”
Even the 4K version of Barnett’s set (bit.ly/VR-multi-POV) at her Nelsonville festival appearance, which the Immersive Media Initiative shot, looks a bit dodgy; the video is grainy and the audio is decent, at best. But once you grab hold of the camera from your computer, you instantly realize the potential here: you are on stage, you can move between Barnett and her bass player, and you can spin around and see individuals in the audience as they see them. You can look up and explore the lighting grid or look to stage left and see monitorworld in action. The novelty doesn’t wear off; instead, you wish there were a few more cameras. Soon, there will be.
The Gears are Turning
Antonuccio’s program at Ohio University is pretty evolved. Last February, the university’s Innovation Strategy program awarded $878,000 to the Immersive Media Initiative to develop a new curriculum and hands-on research and creative projects for Ohio University students to gain the experiences they need to join this burgeoning field. The Immersive Media Initiative team has used that to build an infrastructure around VR, also partnering with other universities, such as Russ College of Engineering and Technology, Patton College of Education and the Scripps College of Communication and its GRID Lab, which offers students a facility, equipment, software and real-world learning experiences in research and development in game design and immersive media.
The program’s goals are ambitious and extend into a number of verticals, including medicine and education, but live music holds a special allure. “Music is an experience just about everyone shares,” he says. “It’s the perfect place for virtual reality.”
Others are already putting roots down in music. Palo Alto, CA-based startup Jaunt has true high-res shows by Jack White and Paul McCartney on its site. There’s also the purposely enigmatic Magic Leap, a Ft. Lauderdale company that earlier this year completed what may be the largest C-round of financing in history: $793.5 million, with a total of $1.4 billion invested in it so far, despite the fact that it has not released even a beta version, not even to developers, of a technology reportedly close to a Harry Potter level of wizardry. And there are plenty of known names in the mix, as well, such as Samsung and
Apple.
Live Music Is Changing
Anyone who remembers the dot-com bust of 2000 understands that just because a lot of people throw a lot of money at something doesn’t mean that there’s necessarily anything there. On the other hand, it’s also clear that live music is heading for an inflection point: the machinery that manufactures the hits that drive people to spend $300 for a stadium ticket is vastly smaller than a few decades ago, and the legacy acts that still make up about half of the top-10 tours each year are slowly but surely heading into very comfortable assisted-living facilities.
VR offers touring music the ability to vastly broaden the places a show can go — with the consumer VR experience moving towards mobile phones and personal devices such as the Oculus Rift, Gear VR, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, tours can go anywhere a potential ticket buyer is.
Antonuccio’s correct in that VR won’t replace being there. It can’t — it’s the concert itself that is the basis for any VR experience. Concert developers (is that a new term?) will have to find ways to make getting there and being there even more compelling than it is today. And may well extend to bringing the VR experience itself into the live experience, in the form of VR’s cousin, Augmented Reality (AR), which can be used to annotate live shows, presenting the viewer with lyrics (maybe right off the same iPad the lead singer is using) or alternative views, a kind of live director’s cut.
The Audio Perspective
How the audio crew of today is going to fit into this brave new world remains to be seen. For starters, they will still perform the same mixing and system-management tasks they do today, but how the audio feeds for the VR and AR iterations of the shows will be mixed remain to be, well, invented. Ambisonic microphones will coexist on stage with shotguns. The tools are already starting to appear, such as Sennheiser’s new AMBEO VR mic, designed to be used — among other applications — for the GoPro 360 VR camera rig. Will the virtual reality trend create new positions (and jobs) for the future, or simply create more work for the FOH and monitor mixers already being asked to remix multitrack audio for post-show fan site distribution?
No one knows that the future will look like exactly, but it’s going to include VR. How that technology gets applied to live music is being worked out as we speak, although that work is being largely carried on by academics like those in Antonuccio’s group and by technology firms for which music is, while important, just another content element in their view of the universe. It’s time for those on the front lines of live music to find ways to help steer where that future is headed.
