Sophia Ppali
University of the Arts, London, United Kingdom
The acoustic and visual experiences of musicians in the spaces they perform in is complex and organic in nature, entailing a continuous interaction with the environment. With this project, we leverage the power of Virtual Reality (VR) to support musicians in their creative practice by transporting them to novel sonic and visual worlds. For this, we developed a musician-centered VR system, featuring various acoustic and visual virtual environments, VR Rehearse & Perform, based on design requirements gathered with musicians and performance experts. To investigate how VR can be designed to support music-makers in their creative musical practice, we performed iterative tests with 19 musicians followed by semi-structured interviews. Our findings suggest that VR has the potential to support different aspects of the creative musical practice such as rehearsing, performing and improvising. Our research provides insights and inspirations toward designing musician-centred VR experiences for a variety of musical activities.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501922
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)