This is a quick post to both pose some questions and reflect on a passion of mine. How can we use immersive 3D environments to better collaborate on making music together as musicians, DJs and music producers. I have been working with a project team exploring how we might do this, but, despite a lot of effort and exploring, we in fact probably have more questions than answers now than when we began. So, hence this post.
Do you have any ideas of how to possibly use immersive gaming worlds to better serve the music community in getting together virtually to better collaborate and share their music? A virtual collaboration environment allows people from around the world to easily work together (my main collaboration is on another continent). Also in times of a global pandemic playing music together virtually even makes more sense. Please comment at the end of this post with your thoughts and comments on next steps that we might take to do this. We really need your help with some new ideas.
There has been live music performance in games for over 15 years starting with the original big splash of Suzanne Vega playing live in Second Life. In fact, whenever a new virtual world springs up, DJs and musicians are usually quick to “colonize it’ by playing DJ sets and the usual solo acoustic set. Dance clubs are probably the most often built rooms and worlds that populate these social virtual worlds.
The events are usually sparsely attended which is often due to the fact that these worlds only have a limited set of people they can draw on (active players of their social game) and the technology limitations of the platform like a given instance of the room or world in the game can only hold a certain number of people.
Our project team, Music Oasis, has done many DJ events, live electronic music performances, some live coding algoraving and also some beat type games to try and collaborate as musicians. But, it hasn’t been enough. I was hoping that we could maybe have a studio environment in a virtual world and somehow use that as a hangout and a place where we could use some software to collaborate our musical ideas in.
Does anyone know of any kind of DAW or other music software that will allow people to collaborate in real time that we could integrate into a Virtual World Studio for music collaboration? I know Pre5et is also interested in this project as a tool for the Music Producers Amino community.
Here is a video, shot by my good friend Bernard Drax about the music collaboration that we have tried to do in one virtual world called Sansar. You can see with Blue (my main collaborator), Draxtor and me in this video using two sample loopers and a mixer I built in Sansar for collaboration. I have also played with acoustic musicians in a virtual cafe setting where we traded off live songs and streamed them into a Virtual World. But, this wasn’t true collaboration. So, any ideas on technical solutions, software to integrate or any other thoughts on virtual music collaboration would be welcome!
