UC San Diego

Virtual reality as a platform provides untapped potential for the popular music video through its affordance of multisensorial convergence, which aligns with and greatly expands upon the evolution of music as an audiovisual medium. Current popular models for music video representation in virtual spaces utilize many of the unique features afforded by virtual reality including 360 video, audiovisual reactivity, spatialization and interactivity, however, most still act as repeatable experiences tethered to design conventions for two-dimensional digital spaces and ideals related to the archetypal performer-audience dynamic.

This paper explores the potential for music artists to create toward virtual reality by examining the intersection between narrative-based music production and existing music-centered virtual reality experiences, proposing a framework in which emotion, narrative and both mediums iteratively inform each other to create a set of altered design principles for meaningful creation toward this intersectional space.

A series of music-centered virtual reality case studies will be presented to support this argument. Exemplified will be the interactive virtual reality composition “Pigments of Imagination”, a musical piece created by the author with virtual reality as a destination, and thus presented as a narrative journey weaved by and dependent on the technical relationship between compositional, visual, and interactive elements in a virtual space.