Attempting Hybrid Interactivity and Immersion Through Musical Performance

I recently performed a gig with my musical collaborator Liam Ross which was designed to encourage interactivity and a sense of immersion both in the room and also with online participants. A way of moving beyond a passive audience to an environment where through interaction, a sense of community, connection and immersion were created.

Each song had a designed and tested interaction and these involved sounds, smells, light cast shadows and reflections produced by individuals using their phones. This was a complex and ambitious idea. As well as all the audience participation the arrangement of the songs involved location recordings, sometimes featuring footsteps at particular tempos that were also layered over the performance. This variety of input, interaction and sound sources achieved moments of shared experience and genuine connection. It did however made the whole experience a little unwieldy and hard work to navigate for both performers and listeners. It certainly was never a passive experience for the audience which on reflection may have been a bit of a mistake. A balance of time spent listening passively and interacting is, I think, a better fit for this type of event.

The online layer of participation added another aspect which at times did work convincingly and the synchronous sound participation worked as intended (examples attached). The lights and reflections were explained to online participants and information about sitting in a darkened room was shared. On reflection however I should have encouraged participants to aim their cameras at the wall or roof as seeing faces in the dark was, at times, distracting from the overall effects.

This was an ambitious and successful evening with many of the effects and ideas really working well. Each audience member had a small plastic sealed tub containing water and used their mobile phones to cast this watery light on to the room of the venue. This effect accompanied a song about a river flowing and was a particularly effective and immersive moment.

I have attached a small edit of the audio of the live streamed recording which offers a glimpse at some of the aural interactions that included the performers, in the room audience and online participants to give a flavour of the success of the approach.