Hearing history: A virtual perspective on music performance

Acoustic space is fundamental to the way that we experience live music in performance, but it is a dimension of performance that is exceptionally difficult to control and to replicate between venues. While this makes some sites incredibly attractive as performance and recording venues, it also limits the opportunity for composers and performers to actively and systematically use space as a musical effect, and it presents challenges for performers of historic music, who must reimagine historic repertoire for modern concert venues that are very different spaces to those that would have been known to composers, performers and audiences in the past. This chapter explores 3D sound modelling and music performance as key – though often neglected – points of interface in Virtual Reality (VR), and how the technology of VR gaming might be used as a platform for investigating historical performance spaces and the music that was performed within them. It explores how virtual acoustics might provide new insights into historic and musicological research, and how VR-derived post-production tools might lead to new approaches to classical music production; new commercial music products and revenue, and the opportunities and challenges that present to audiences, performers and composers.