Renewing Contemporary Music Composing, Performing, and Listening Experience: Immersion as Part of the Creative Process and Recording

The potential of virtual reality tools and the variety of software suitable for creating interactive music systems and sound environments provides artists, sound engineers, and music listeners more technical and artistic room than ever before. On top of enriching and facilitating the creative process of professional artists, VR technologies can also bring the music and visual contents of an artwork nearer to the audience, allowing them to better immerse themselves in the experience. Moreover, implementing such systems may help to bring more audiences to experimental contemporary music, thus also playing an important role in renewing the classical music culture. Hans-Peter Gasselseder produced the first ever virtual reality ambisonic recordings of two entire operas, “She” (2017 by Maria Kallionpää) and Croak (2018, composed by Maria Kallionpää and Markku Klami). We argue that on top of the artistic value of the musical compositions, a complete virtual reality recording has artistic value on its own right. We will discuss both operas from the composer ́s perspective, as well as present their recording processes as case studies from the viewpoint of the sound engineer. As an example of future work, we will also present a new virtual reality recording concept, using Maria Kallionpää ́s interactive Disklavier Composition “Climb!” (2016-2017). The work is simultaneously a virtuoso piano composition for a professional pianist and a computer game, that also uses a specifically designed smartphone application for audience members. Although the work contains visual stimuli also in the live performance situation, we argue that the listeners could better enjoy the interactive game element if they could follow the events directly from the performer ́s perspective. Our model will focus on bringing the audience members in the middle of the actions of the virtual environment of the computer game.