The acoustic and visual experiences of musicians in the spaces they perform in are complex and organic in nature, entailing a continuous interaction with the environment. With this project, we leveraged the power of Virtual Reality to support musicians in their creative practice by transporting them to novel sonic and visual worlds.

For this, we developed a musician-centred 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 fndings suggest that VR has the potential to support diferent 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 various musical activities.

This project was presented as a Full paper and demo at ACM CHI 2022 and as a Demo/ Poster at VRST 2021.