Real orchestra performs in Virtual Venue

NYT
September 18, 2007
Music
Watching a Cyber Audience Watch a Real Orchestra Perform in a Virtual World
By ANNE MIDGETTE

People really dress for concerts around here. One man sports a bright purple suit, with a hat and roller skates to match. A woman wears a gown that appears to be made of peacock feathers, and a large blue butterfly flaps gently in circles around her.

We’re not in Kansas anymore, or even in Liverpool, England, where the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic opened its season on Friday night. For the occasion the orchestra went to the unusual extreme of building a new hall: a virtual environment in the online world Second Life. In a virtual replica of the Art Deco hall, an audience of animated figures, known as avatars, watched the orchestra perform live in a choppy video streamed over the Internet on a screen at the front of the room.

Call it the future, call it a stunt, Second Life is attracting more and more attention, and classical music is starting to get in on the act. Universal Classics has built an online island where visitors can inspect a replica of the exhibition of artifacts associated with the legendary mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran that is now touring Europe to promote Cecilia Bartoli’s next Malibran-themed album.

In May the pianist Lang Lang, in the form of an avatar, gave a live concert. And the Liverpool was the third orchestra to give a live concert on Second Life this year, after Sinfonia Leeds, an amateur group in England, and Red {an orchestra}, a chamber ensemble in Cleveland.

There are technical and conceptual hurdles in watching animations play live music in a virtual world. A YouTube video of a Dutch pianist playing Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata on Second Life illustrates some of the issues: the performance is fine, but the figure’s fingers keep disappearing into the keys.

“It’s an odd medium,” said John Shibley, the director of organizational learning at the consulting company EmcArts, which helped manage Red’s performance. “It’s sort of like listening to the radio and watching a puppet show, and the puppet show is not synched to the radio.”

Each of the three orchestras to perform so far has taken a different approach. Leeds offered live streaming audio, with a small orchestra of miming avatars. Red created the equivalent of a television broadcast. Liverpool opted for a cheaper solution: a single static camera.

This approach, though inelegant, may have been the most workable. Red’s chief executive, John Farina, estimated that had the orchestra not received many services pro bono, its event would have cost around $200,000. The orchestra was left with a professional-quality broadcast tape, which, because of restrictions in its contract with its musicians, it cannot broadcast again.

Liverpool, by contrast, paid only $16,000 or so, $6,000 of which went to buying the “sims” on which the concert hall was built. (A sim is the unit of land on Second Life.) The orchestra also has the advantage of a new contract with its musicians that involved buying their potential share in broadcast rights.

“We can use any material in any way we like,” said Millicent Jones, the orchestra’s executive director of marketing and communications, who is already looking into future Second Life performances.

There are certainly limitations to the Second Life concert experience. A sim can hold only 50 to 70 avatars without crashing, so even though Liverpool built its hall over two sims and broadcast the concert to other Second Life locations, it had a relatively small audience.

And as with any streamed Internet broadcast, transmission quality depends on your Internet connection. On my computer the sound was so distorted that a preconcert lecture was utterly unintelligible; the soprano, Kate Royal, sounded as if she were singing a duet with herself in Ravel’s “Shéhérazade.” It was impossible to assess the music, which included world premieres by Kenneth Hesketh and John McCabe.

Other listeners said their connections were fine. And afterward the audience, congregating in the bar for virtual drinks and a question-and-answer session with the conductor, Vasily Petrenko, seemed to have loved the whole thing — perhaps as much for the experience as for the music.

“Classical music is not very accessible where I am, so I really appreciated it,” said a user whose Second Life name was Nobody Fugazi.

Despite predictions that virtual worlds will become increasingly prevalent, the technology of Second Life is in its infancy. Both within classical music and outside it, there is debate about whether the place represents a brave new world or simply a curiosity.

“It’s still kind of in the stunt phase,” said the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, though he personally knows the people at Linden Labs who invented the site and is a fan of the novel “Snow Crash,” by Neal Stephenson, which inspired it. He and Linden Labs, he said, are “talking in friendly stages about something we might do.”

Jonathan Gruber, the vice president for new media of Universal Music Group, said: “We’re not 100 percent sold on it. It’s experimental. We are interested in making sure that if there are opportunities for us to reach people through a medium like Second Life, we’re there for it.”

The medium may be cutting-edge, but tastes remain rather conservative. Some listeners reacted in horror to the exuberant loudness of Mr. Hesketh’s piece, and one called it “just noise.”

Dave Schwartz, the founder of Music Academy Online, where he conducts small listening sessions, dreams of bringing classical music to a wider audience by creating a “Disney World of classical music” on Second Life.

But Mr. Schwartz is also trying to bring newer music to this environment. .

“You haven’t heard ‘Poème Électronique,’ ” he said, referring to a piece by Edgard Varèse, “till you’ve heard it streamed over the Internet in a virtual world.”