"Becoming: An Interactive Musical Journey in VR" Opening Night
By Shahrokh Yadegari, John Burnett, Eito Murakami and Louis Pisha
Thursday, November 3, 2022
Host: Shahrokh Yadegari
Time: 5 - 8 p.m.

Agenda

• 5 p.m. Calit2 Auditorium: Presentations with Shahrokh Yadegari, John Burnett, Eito Murakami and Louis Pisha
• 6 p.m. Reception, gallery open

RSVPs for opening night requested to galleryqi@ucsd.edu.

Link to livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tmwF6dffLs

"Becoming" will be on display in the Gallery QI through December 2, 2022. The Gallery QI is also offering guided experiences of the new exhibition on Fridays in November through early December. Make sure to reserve your spot here. 

Gallery Hours
November 3 - December 2, 2022
12 - 5 p.m., Monday-Friday

Gallery Closed
During UCSD Holidays and Closures
https://galleryqi.ucsd.edu

Description

"Becoming" is the result of a collaborative work that was initiated at the Opera Hack organized by San Diego Opera. It is an operatic VR experience based on a Persian poem by Mowlana Rumi depicting the evolution of human spirit. The audience experiences visual, auditory and tactile impressions which are partly curated and partly generated interactively in response to the player's actions.

"Becoming" incorporates fluid and reactive graphical material which embodies the process of transformation depicted in the Rumi poem. Worlds seamlessly morph between organic and synthetic environments such as oceans, mountains and cities and are populated by continuously evolving life forms. The music is a union of classical Persian music fused with electronic music where the human voice becomes the beacon of spirit across the different stages of the evolution. The various worlds are constructed by the realtime manipulation of particle systems, flocking algorithms and terrain generation methods---all of which can be touched and influenced by the viewer. Audience members can be connected through the network and haptic feedback technology provides human interaction cues as well as an experiential stimulus.

While the piece is a major artistic endeavor, it also showcases a number of key technologies and streaming techniques for the development of musical content in XR. The spatialization system Space3D, developed at Sonic Arts and implemented to run on advanced GPUs, is capable of creating highly realistic spatial impressions, and recreating the acoustics of the environment based on the virtual models in real-time using advanced multi-processing ray-tracing techniques.

"Becoming" premiered at SIGGRAPH 2022, Immersive Pavilion in Vancouver, Canada in August 2022. Opera America and San Diego Opera showcased an early preview of this work as part of the first Opera Hack presentations in 2020.

Credits:

• Vocals: Mahsa Vahdat
• Barbat: Jimmy Mahlis
• Tombak: Mammad Zadeh
• Percussion: Satnam Ramgotra
• VR Infrastructure and Creative Design: John Burnett and Eito Murakami
• Graphic Design: Francesca Talenti
• Haptic Design and Programming: Juliette Regimbal
• Haptic Design Adviser: Yongjae Yoo
• GPU Programming: Louis Pisha
• Direction and Composition: Shahrokh Yadegari
• Additional Production Assistance: Timothy Gmeiner, Valen Chang, and Aiden Afshar
• Volunteers: Andrina Zhang, Victor Joulin-Batejat, and Aleck Adriano

Biographies

Shahrokh Yadegari, composer, sound designer, and producer, has performed and his productions, compositions, and designs have been presented internationally in such venues as the Carnegie Hall, Royce Hall, Festival of Arts and Ideas, OFF-D'Avignon Festival, International Theatre Festival in Cluj Romania, Ravinia Festival, Ruhr-Triennale, Vienna Festival, Holland Festival, Tirgan Festival, Forum Barcelona, Japan America Theatre, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the Institut fur Neue Musik und Musikerziehung (Darmstadt), Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, and Contemporary Museum of Art, San Diego. Yadegari is currently on the faculty of the department of Music at UC San Diego, and the associate director of Qualcomm Institute where he directs the Sonic Arts Research and Development group.

John Burnett (b. 1993) is a multimedia artist and technologist based in Los Angeles, California. Drawing from a background in music composition, graphics, and computer science, they create technologically augmented and reactive multimedia experiences, installations, and virtual reality works as well as sound and projection design for dance, theater, and film productions. Their work revolves around themes such as the slippage of identity in digital representation, (dis)embodiment within virtual and real environments, and virtuality in the context of mystical practice and ideology. John is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at UC San Diego. John was previously a member of the Sonic Arts research team, based in the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, where they researched audio spatialization algorithms and multimodal interaction.

Eito Murakami is a master's student at Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. He graduated from University of California San Diego with bachelor's degrees in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Music (ICAM) and Political Science/International Relations. Eito is an electronic composer, performer, sound designer, and virtual reality developer. By combining his classical music training with proficiency in audio and graphics software, he creates digital interfaces and instruments that promote intuitive musical performance. Specifically, he specializes in Unreal Engine to develop audiovisual infrastructure that allows multiplayer interactions in virtual 3D environments via network. Eito is a former member of the Sonic Arts Research and Development group at UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute.

Louis Pisha is a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at UC San Diego, where he recently defended his dissertation entitled "Systems and Algorithms for Real-Time Audio Signal Processing". A major component of his Ph.D. work was on Space3D, a real-time acoustic modeling and audio spatialization system running on NVIDIA GPUs, which is responsible for audio rendering in Becoming. Louis's interests and experience range across computer architecture, parallel algorithms, systems design, real-time audio processing, music, and interactive artistic experiences. He loves to find clever ways to make existing hardware do new things.