Musical Expression in VR

This is an image of a man with a virtual reality headset sitting in front of an electronic piano while playing it and looking to the left. The man and the piano are facing the viewer.

As part of a course on Design for Virtual Reality, we developed a VR application to help novice musicians gain a visual intuition for music theory concepts like harmony and scales. As part of a team of 3 students (Maulashree, Amarnath and me), we created the virtual environments which consisted of visual landscapes that responded to a player’s musical input. We mapped the physical position and scale of the real electronic keyboard to the virtual environment, and used the Leap Motion sensor to allow players to see their hands in VR.

A short video demo of the same can be found below:

A player in session (you can see the virtual environment on the screen at the bottom left):

This is an image of a participant playing the electronic piano while wearing the VR headset. There is a laptop screen with the visualisation at the bottom right left corner of the image.

Another picture of the demo:

A crowd of people surrounds the participant while they play the electronic piano and wear the VR headset simultaneously