How you can perform with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra - virtually

Now audience members in Edinburgh will have the chance to “perform” with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in an Edinburgh Festival Fringe show.

Concerts of the Future, a cutting-edge, immersive VR experience, will see five members of the public at a time learn to “play” instruments before joining in a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony number seven.

Budding musicians are assigned a unique fictional instrument from a future orchestra to use, each with its own personality and sound. Through custom-built wireless gestural controllers called AirSticks, audiences swap out keys, strings and valves for gesture and movement to play with the 50-strong orchestra, which recorded the music at a special session in Australia earlier this year.

Ciaran Frame, co-founder of the Sonicrats, said the technology uses a 360 camera which consumes a terrabyte of data every ten seconds.

“The whole point of the show is that anyone can plays in an orchestra,” he said. “The way the participants sees the symphony orchestra is through the VR head set and it’s stereoscopic vision, which is 3D. It’s like they’re sitting right in front of you, which is amazing.

“You get a seat in the middle of the orchestra and play any instrument with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra,” he said.

Participants practice in a small group and then move through to the “concert hall”.

“People have been shocked at how real it felt,” Mr Frame said. “And a lot of that is coming from the sound in the room, we make it feel like it is coming from the players, which is eerily intimate, you feel like you can reach out and touch them.”

“A lot of the magic of VR is what you put around it, so if we have a warm up room and theatre around the experience, then it culminates in playing with an ensemble. It’s much better than walking into a soulless room and whacking on a headset.”

The orchestra took part in a special recording three months ago.

“It was a unique recording, it’s not like going to a normal concert,” said Mr Frame. “The person sitting inside the headset is a part of the orchestra, they can see how the orchestra looks, what players are around them and so on.

“It’s funny, because they’re not there, but they’re such an essential part of the work. It wouldn’t be the same if it was AI-generated or animated, you really feel like there’s that real human element to it, even though there’s a lot of technology between the orchestra and you.

“You’re in the headset for eight minutes and when you take it off, it’s a bit of a shock, it becomes your reality after a while.”

They have previously held a smaller-scale show in Melbourne of a similar kind with a recording of a chamber orchestra, Rubiks, but has not used the MSO recording publicly outside of testing.

“That was the first outing for the technology,” he said. “But this is the premiere for the MSO work in Scotland.”

He said the technology could be used in the future

“Who knows, in the future, there could be other bands and other performers, because the technology is always getting better. There’s a lot of VR out there where you can watch a band or a performer, but ours is different because we want you to play, it’s not a passive experience.”

Part of the House of Oz series at the Fringe, Concerts of the Future is at Summerhall from 6 to 30 August.