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Regardless of genre or feel, all those projects have one thing in common: they don’t sing you a song so much as drop you into the middle of one. “In traditional music videos,” says Chris Milk, a celebrated music video director turned founder of VR company Within, “the viewer is outside of the experience, looking inward. In VR, people are right in the middle of it.” Narrative, story-first music videos—like Michael Jackson’s 13-minute “Thriller” epic, to name the one that literally everyone mentions whenever they bring this up—just don’t work in VR. Not yet, anyway. What VR does best right now is enhance the sort of raw, Rorschach emotion that makes music powerful in the first place.
The best example of VR’s potential so far is probably “Old Friend,” a much-loved piece by animator Tyler Hurd that’s set to a Future Islands song of the same name. You put on your headset, and an outrageous dance party starts all around you. Using the HTC Vive’s controllers and positional tracking, your avatar dances however you dance. Hurd was making the video for less powerful systems like the Gear VR, but he found the Vive’s full-body experience irresistible. “As soon as you start leaning around and looking at things,” he says, “they feel more real. You stop wondering and you just let yourself be there.” He calls his video “an overwhelming barrage of nonsensical joy.” It’s not a game or a story; it’s an experience, a place.
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Cripps and the “Drugs” crew wanted to create a similarly visceral effect—and the song, mellow and moody, was a perfect match. “Everyone kind of immediately felt like ‘Drugs’ was the best fit,” Ng says. Cripps and his crew shot with a strange-looking rig: a Canon 5D on top of a Kinect, which together capture real-time three-dimensional data using beta software created by a New York company called DepthKit. The resulting aesthetic is pure wireframed data, like a glitchy Tron landscape crossed with Star Trek’s Holodeck. At one point the picture floats over a mesh surface, panning down and out until you realize it’s an outline of a person playing the keyboard.
Ordinarily, with a music video, the song is the easy part. It’s already done. But making the sound work in VR is a whole other project. So after the rough-cut demo of “Drugs,” the group heads a few miles away to a mansion-slash-office that looks like a stop on an Entourage fan tour. This is the home of Source Sound, a sound-design studio that works on big-name video games and movie trailers, and has become the go-to studio for all things virtual reality. Source started working with Jaunt in 2013, on Jaunt’s first-ever project: a VR concert with Paul McCartney. Since then they’ve worked with everyone from Oculus to Google and YouTube. Tim Gedemer, the owner of Source Sound, gestures grandly to his giant pad and calls it “ground zero of VR and spatial audio.”
Almost immediately after we arrive, Gedemer and Cripps start discussing the “Drugs” video. Cripps doesn’t want to add sound effects to the song, and he doesn’t understand how spatial audio is different from standard stereo. Gedemer smiles, and gives a speech he’s obviously given before. “The first thing,” he says, “is that we need to decouple ourselves from anything we’re used to experiencing.” He puts his index fingers up on either side of his head, each representing a virtual speaker. The audio doesn’t move with you, he says, swinging his head from side to side; it stays where it is as you move.
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At least for Ng, this feels like the very beginning of Eden working with VR. It’s really important to him, a native of YouTube and Soundcloud, that everyone can experience what he makes. “I’ve been very conscious,” he says, “that I want it to work for people who don’t have Oculus or a VR headset, and are just watching on a 360 video.” That’s still tough to pull off. SB Projects, which manages Ng along with artists like Justin Bieber and Kanye West, worked with Dodocase to get a few thousand headsets to press, influencers, and fans who bought the VIP ticket package. Ng is already teaching himself some VR-making skills, and thinking about how he can incorporate the tech into his tour and music.
Ultimately, VR’s appeal to the music industry goes way beyond music videos. Imagine getting a front-row seat to a concert halfway around the world, live-streamed to your couch. Or maybe you and your friends all put on your Hololenses and watch an acoustic set right in your own living room. Next time Beyonce makes a visual album (Limeade!), you could be part of it. You could go to a concert, then go see a VR doc of the band practicing—and feel like you’re there too. Music is about connection, closeness, shared experience. VR may not be able to put you on the tour bus—but in all the other ways that matter, it kind of can..
Source: Wired