I was at Sónar festival in Barcelona this weekend, and one of the things that stood out for me what how important visuals have become for live electronic music artists. It makes sense electronic acts would lead the way here, both because of familiarity with technology, and a certain boring guy-with-laptop sameness of performance that doesn’t create energy like a live rock-band can. The visuals are a performance aid.
This is the sound/visual control island at the night venue’s main stage - notable because it’s as deep as it is wide, with four rows of computers and technicians, and only one of the four rows seems to deal with sound, while the other three layers of technology all control lights, screens, lasers and other visuals. Visuals require three times as many resources as sound engineering at a music festival. One act was delayed ten minutes purely because his windows laptop wouldn’t play nice with the projectors - lack of visuals was a sufficient impediment to performance to hold up the show.
There were a couple of different styles of visuals seeming (to me) to be trying to be volumetric:
a) The coloured lasers seemed to be trying to “carve out” visual spaces and shapes - certainly (they aren’t making any discernable pattern at the endpoint of the beam, seen from about 11 seconds into the video), and they aren’t doing the usual laser-show trick of projecting things like grids on smoke.
b) Straight-ahead projection onto a 3D shape. The mesh-screen in conjunction with the back-screen make it feel like the band are performing in the middle of a textured cube.
c) This is harder to describe, but the singer was using a strobe as if to reach out and “touch” the audience.
It felt like, if given working projective AR tech at low installation costs, many artists would jump at the chance for a more immersive show. Certainly I see Kinect-ish technology having an impact here in coming years. The nice thing about AR from a festival-artist’s perspective is you can have a “set” without necessarily bringing and installing it. Cell-phone or HMD based displays won’t cut it though; this needs to be something the whole audience can share.
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