Conducting Across Realities

This talk will discuss Weaver’s conducting work over the past 25 years in music and multidisciplinary projects in local, hybrid, and virtual settings. Topics will include strategies for conducting through video conference, data gloves, haptics, avatars, and more.

Sound Becomes Site: Music of the Metaverse

This presentation will trace a line from the creative concerns of avant-garde composition and electronic music in the twentieth-century to twenty-first century practices with virtual environments, real-time simulation and networked digital space. Connections between early development of the Buchla synthesizer and contemporary experimental practices exploring sound in digital space will be drawn, highlighting novel conceptual approaches to organizing sonic material in emerging mediums. These connections will be highlighted through examples from my own creative practice using virtual environments, game engines, networked ‘metaverse’ platforms and similar, then contextualized through a survey of recent developments surrounding creative sound and music in virtual space.

Development and evaluation of a mixed reality music visualization for a live performance

Live concerts increasingly integrate multimedia, with a growing interest in Extended Reality to enhance the audience experience. While many studies focus on technical aspects, the perceptual and psychological effects of visual media in live music contexts remain underexplored. This presentation covers a study investigating the impact of a real-time Mixed Reality (MR) music visualization during a live performance. In a lab-based experiment, participants experienced the same music performance with and without the MR music visualization. Differences in aesthetic experience, musical absorption, social interaction, and mind wandering are examined, providing new insights into how MR shapes the live music experience. Furthermore, technical implementations and future directions are discussed.

Second Life as an Artistic Medium: Musical and Sound Installative Practices in a Virtual World

This presentation examines Second Life as one of the earliest and most enduring user-built metaverses. Since its inception in 2003, the platform has evolved into a dynamic environment for experimental, participatory, and intermedia art. This talk focuses on its comparatively underexplored potential as a medium for interactive musical and sound installation practices. Drawing on my experience of creating interactive installations and participating in the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM), the presentation explores how the concepts of composition, performance, and listening are reconfigured through embodied interaction, distributed agency and collective creation. Second Life’s immersive yet socially and technically mediated nature reveals both expanded aesthetic possibilities and persisting structural limitations.

Live Coding Across Virtual Worlds: From Pandemic Metaverses to Live Immersive Coding

This talk reflects on the evolution of shared live coding practices across physical, virtual, and hybrid performance contexts. Starting from audiovisual programming prior to the pandemic, we seek to share and analyze the shift toward metaversal environments understood as three-dimensional or two-dimensional spaces that emulate a place, as well as their expansions into mixed realities. The internet, understood as a “space” or “metaspace,” is the guiding thread for this reflection, where live coders have woven their communities, tools, and of course performative spaces—such as PatchXR concerts for MUTEK and experiments in Mozilla Hubs—where live coding expanded toward metaversal and global performance. The talk addresses the emergence of immersive live coding, including recent works connecting TidalCycles with Unreal Engine, Wwise, and other game development tools. Through several pieces and 3D virtual environments, we will discuss how these spaces became programmable performative environments.

Live Coding virtual scenography and staging with A-Frame

This talk explores various projects created with A-Frame, a web framework for XR, in this case for performances and installations, and examines the possibilities for live coding in 3D worlds. The focus will be primarily on the visual and interactive aspects of these environments. The talk offers reflections on both the technical and conceptual aspects of this practice, addressing key questions: How can we control 3D spaces in real time? What does this experience bring to a live performance? What are its limitations? And why is there a need to expand performance into the virtual world?