EvoluSon: Walking through an Interactive History of Music

Abstract

The EvoluSon project proposes an immersive experience where the spectator explores an interactive visual and musical representation of the main periods of the history of Western music. The musical content is constituted of original musical compositions based on the theme of Bach's Art of Fugue to illustrate the eight main musical eras from Antiquity to the contemporary epoch. The EvoluSon project contributes at the same time to the usage of VR for intangible culture representation and to interactive digital art that puts the user at the centre of the experience. The EvoluSon project focuses on music through a presentation of the history of Western music, and uses virtual reality to valorise the different pieces through the ages. The user is immersed in a coherent visual and sound environment and can interact with both modalities. This project is the result of collaboration between a computer science research laboratory and a research laboratory on art and music. It was first presented to a public event on science and music organised by the computer science research laboratory.

SABLIER : a Tangible Interactor to Navigate through Space and Time

“…According to Section 2, works proposing spatial and temporal navigation metaphors generally provide single scale temporal navigation [6,13,17,31]. Furthermore, Tangible User Interfaces have shown many advantages for the cultural heritage domain in terms of attractiveness [32], engagement [5] and are preferred to the use of phones in a museum context [38].…”

“…Instead of using a virtual object to navigate through time, Gaugne et al propose to link the temporal and spatial navigation. In Evoluson [17] the user is offered the possibility to explore the history of Western music from antiquity to the present day. Because each period is represented by a room, the user changes the observed period by moving from a room to another one.…”

Music in Extended Realities

“…Examples for performance are reported in [36], [71], [143], for education in [8], [49], [56], [74], for composition in [37], [45], [64], [102], and for sound engineering in [11], [83]. Other XR systems have focused on entertainment [79], [128], [166], including music visualization [55], [156] and musicrelated cultural heritage applications [60], [114], [142]. Such systems include VRMIs [26], [57], [91], [137], and interfaces for audience members [96].…”