Working creatively in organisations

As a result of posting my music on YouTube, I get contacted regularly by other musicians - which is always interesting.  Sometimes to say they’ve been inspired to learn to play the harp, sometimes with more specific requests to play the music themselves in public. In late September I got a rather more unusual request, asking my permission to include my music in a video game. Having been sent some images of this virtual world, and learned a bit about what would take place in this virtual world, I was only too happy to agree to the music being used in that context.

Over the following days, I looked again at the game designer’s images and I thought about the idea of using my music in this “space” and what it might be like to make more connections with that - and I decided on a further experiment: to actually play the harp in the virtual world, by incorporating my live playing into the digital space created by this particular graphic designer. Although requiring special techniques - using lighting and bluescreen, and (if I’m being really experimental) using specialist 3D modelling software which tracks the camera movements and then controls the 3D virtual space around it, it should be possible to make it appear as if I’m really there, and make the scenery move around me in a natural way. Visually that’s quite unusual, but I reason that we do similar things in sound, all the time, whenever we add artificial reverb to a recording. I haven’t tried this in visual terms, with an artificial space, and I think it should be an intriguing experience.

What’s the point, though? Why go to all this trouble? At least part of the answer is the challenge, and the unknown things that might come out of that, but mostly the reason is to explore by comparison the qualities that real spaces influence and are influenced by, our presence. We can artificially place ourselves in a space, and perform in it, but real spaces have a subtle, multi-faceted influence on us. Performing (or speaking, or thinking) in a real space, we are aware of so much - the size of the acoustic influences the speed of our communication (hugely!), the presence of other people, and their relationship to us as colleagues or more formally as audience, other sensory inputs such as background noises, the play of the light, the sense of others who inhabit / have inhabited this room. All of these are difficult to simulate and by doing a “surgical”, technical experiment I can come to appreciate the way in which our presence and our surroundings are interwoven.

I think it’s amazing that it all came from an initial experiment to put out a piece of music on YouTube - to put out something I considered “imperfect” (ironically, something which was recorded in a “real” space!).