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Through the nexus of event attendance motives, event experience, eventscape, and the Uses and Gratifications Theory to inform the conceptual framework of this study, this article sheds light on the motives and experience in attending virtual and physical music events. It adopts a qualitative case study approach to explore the motives and experiences of virtual events based on 55 interviews with people who attended both types of concerts. This research contributes to the literature in music event motivation by connecting the motives and outcomes of attending virtual and physical music concerts, which are similar but manifested differently. Participants of virtual concerts were able to interact with others and enjoy the event atmosphere. The convenience element of eventscape plays an important role in participants' experience, specifically on cost and accessibility. Technology also plays a pivotal role in inducing positive emotions and reaffirming fan identity. Practical implications for staging virtual events are discussed.

Through the nexus of event attendance motives, event experience, eventscape, and the Uses and Gratifications Theory to inform the conceptual framework of this study, this paper sheds light on the motives and experience in attending virtual and physical music events. It adopts a qualitative case study approach to explore the motives and experiences of virtual events based on 55 interviews who attended both types of concerts. This research contributes to the literature in music event motivation by connecting the motives and outcomes of attending virtual and physical music concerts, which are similar but manifested differently. Participants of virtual concerts were able to interact with others and enjoy the event atmosphere. The convenience element of eventscape plays an important role in participants’ experience, specifically on cost and accessibility. Technology also plays a pivotal role in inducing positive emotions and reaffirming fan identity. Practical implications for staging virtual events are discussed.

This paper presents Vaulted Harmonies, a 66-min animated feature film created as part of the scientific outreach effort of the Past Has Ears at Notre-Dame project (ANR-PHEND). The project investigates the historical acoustics of Notre-Dame de Paris and their influence on music over the centuries. The film is structured around eleven musical pieces spanning the 12th to 20th centuries, each chosen for its relevance to the cathedral’s history and musical heritage. Details include how each piece was recorded and auralised using a calibrated geometric acoustic model that reflects the acoustics of the corresponding historical period. Further details describe the creation of the CGI renderings of Notre-Dame, which feature animated musicians synchronised with the music they perform, enhancing the immersive quality of the experience. These musical performances are interwoven with short documentary-style segments that provide historical and musicological context. The film adopts a first-person perspective in which the acoustics and visuals dynamically follow the camera’s movement, offering a virtual reality-like experience in a cinematic format. Vaulted Harmonies thus functions both as an engaging archaeoacoustic outreach project and as a standalone virtual concert rooted in historically informed performance and production.

The purpose of this study is to investigate and validate the influencing factors of audiences’ attitudes toward virtual concerts. In order to address this issue, the current study proposes a conceptual model integrating player experience factors (autonomy, relatedness, and engagement) and the technology acceptance model (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment). An online questionnaire on virtual concert experiences was conducted among Chinese audiences who had attended virtual concerts previously. Structural equation modeling was then used to establish the relationships between variables. The results suggested that autonomy, relatedness, and engagement positively impacted perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment. Furthermore, the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment were significant predictors of audiences’ attitudes. The findings of this study could provide a reference for relevant virtual entertainment providers and could also serve as a point of development and exploration for the technology acceptance model and player experience in the field of virtual concerts.

The aim of this paper is three-fold. First, the basics of binaural and ambisonic techniques are briefly presented. Then, details related to audio-visual recordings of a remote performance of the Academic Choir of the Gdansk University of Technology are shown. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, artists had a choice, namely, to stay at home and not perform or stay at home and perform. In fact, staying at home brought in the possibility of creating and developing art at home while working online. During the first months of lock-down, the audience was satisfied with music performances that were fairly far from the typical experience of a real concert hall. Then, more advanced technology was brought to facilitate joint rehearsal and performance of better quality, including multichannel sound and spatialization. At the same time, spatial music productions benefited from the disadvantage of remote rehearsal by creating immersive experiences for the audience based on ambisonic and binaural techniques. Finally, subjective tests were prepared and performed to observe performers’ attention behavior divided between the conductor and music notation in the network-like environment. To this end, eye-tracking technology was employed. This aspect is related to the quality of experience (QoE), which in the performance area–and especially in remote mode–is essential.

Spurred by recent advances in digital technologies, virtual concerts have become established modes for event attendance and represent a rapidly growing segment of the music industry. Yet, up to now, general experience of virtual concert attendees remains largely underexplored. Here, we focus on a subcategory in this domain: music concerts in virtual reality (VR). Our approach is situated within the theoretical framework of embodied music cognition and entailed investigation through a survey study. Responses of seventy-four VR concert attendees were collected, consisting of demographics, motivations, experiences, and future perspectives. In contrast to previous research, which generally identified social connectedness as a main motivator for concert attendance, our sample regarded it as one of the least important incentives. On the other hand, in line with previous studies, ‘seeing specific artists perform’ and ‘uniqueness of the experience’, were pivotal. The latter was mostly fueled by the possibility to experience/interact with visuals and environments considered as unconceivable in the real world. Furthermore, 70% of our sample regarded VR concerts as ‘the future of the music industry’, mainly relating to the accessibility of such events. Positive evaluations of VR concert experiences, as well as future perspectives regarding the medium, were significantly influenced by the level of experienced immersivity. To our knowledge, this is the first study to provide such an account.

The progress of multi-sensory interaction technology provides technical support for creating immersive concerts full of participation and experience. Based on multi-sensory interaction technology, this study proposes the design idea of immersive concerts and outlines the application process of multi-sensory interaction technology in immersive concerts. It builds a concert virtual reality scene through emotion recognition and evocation in the virtual reality scene, designs a gesture interaction interface based on immersive flow field visualization, realizes the construction of an immersive concert, and carries out application evaluation. The model's emotion recognition rate is as high as 93.04%, and after the resting state adjustment, the subjects’ pleasantness and arousal are on the rise, and the ability to evoke emotions is consistent with the expectation. The experimental expectations were met as the mean values of realism and immersion scores were not below 7.6. The percentage of user agreement for clicking and pinching gestures is concentrated in rank 4 and rank 3, and the percentage of voting for comfort is concentrated in rank 2 and reaches 96% and 91%, respectively, which can meet the interaction needs of immersive concerts. This paper presents technical ideas for using multisensory interaction technology in immersive concerts.

We created a virtual reality version of a 1983 performance by Dire Straits, this being a highly complex scenario consisting of both the virtual band performance and the appearance and behaviour of the virtual audience surrounding the participants. Our goal was to understand the responses of participants, and to learn how this type of scenario might be improved for later reconstructions of other concerts. To understand the responses of participants we carried out two studies which used sentiment analysis of texts written by the participants. Study 1 (n = 25) (Beacco et al. in IEEE Virtual Reality: 538–545, 2021) had the unexpected finding that negative sentiment was caused by the virtual audience, where e.g. some participants were fearful of being harassed by audience members. In Study 2 (n = 26) notwithstanding some changes, the audience again led to negative sentiment—e.g. a feeling of being stared at. For Study 2 we compared sentiment with questionnaire scores, finding that the illusion of being at the concert was associated with positive sentiment for males but negative for females. Overall, we found sentiment was dominated by responses to the audience rather than the band. Participants had been placed in an unusual situation, being alone at a concert, surrounded by strangers, who seemed to pose a social threat for some of them. We relate our findings to the concept of Plausibility, the illusion that events and situations in the VR are really happening. The results indicate high Plausibility, since the negative sentiment, for example in response to being started at, only makes sense if the events are experienced as actually happening. We conclude with the need for co-design of VR scenarios, and the use of sentiment analysis in this process, rather than sole reliance on concepts proposed by researchers, typically expressed through questionnaires, which may not reflect the experiences of participants.

The “OVBOX” is a tool for low-delay network audio communication and generic data transmission between multiple clients. Acoustic end-to-end delays of about 30 ms can be achieved, assuming a good internet connection and a distance between clients of less than about 1500 km. For optimal spatial perception, e.g., when using multiple instruments of similar timbre, an individual 3-dimensional room acoustic simulation based on physical modelling is applied in each client. The system is optimised for headless operation using a dedicated single-board computer (Raspberry Pi 4B), but desktop clients are also available for better integration with other audio software. A client-server system allows remote configuration and automatic traversal of network address translation routers and firewalls. With the low latency that can be achieved, the “OVBOX” is used for music applications such as distributed rehearsals or concerts. Other applications include hearing research to achieve interactive speech communication with low delay transmission of head movements for real-time control of virtual reality, and transmission of other biophysical data for online analysis or central data logging. The tool is fully open source.

The use of augmented reality (AR) is the only meaningful way towards the creation and integration of information into a cultural (and not only) analogue leaflet, flyer and poster, which by their nature have limited informational material. The enrichment of information, which an analogue leaflet has, with additional descriptive information (text), multimedia (image, video, sound), 3-D models, etc., gives the end recipient/user a unique experience of approaching and understanding a music event, for example. The Digi-Orch is a research project that aims to create smart printed communication materials (e.g., posters, concert programme booklets) and an accompanying AR application to provide this enhanced audience experience to classical music lovers. The paper presents the ways in which AR can extend and enrich an analogue leaflet/flyer/poster, the features of and how to use the developed AR application, as well as the components, architecture and functions of the system. It also presents the different versions of the AR application within the project, starting with the laboratory versions, continuing with the pilot versions in real conditions (music events) and reaching the final prototype and the educational version of the AR application.