The three-dimensional open work: reimagining indeterminacy through 360° virtual reality scores

Journal article

This article concerns musical performance using scores viewed in virtual reality (VR) headsets. It explains the technological basis for VR headset scores, evaluates their affordances as a performance tool, and demonstrates their relevance to ongoing critical discourses surrounding the performing body, indeterminacy, openness and notation and technologically-facilitated performance. It demonstrates the notational implementation of VR technologies, analysing how virtual score infrastructures might invite embodied engagement with the score, make visible performer decision-making in the context of structurally indeterminate scores, and stage a new and complex relationship between score, performer and audience. These particular affordances are evaluated in the context of both the adaptation of existing music, appraising a new 360° version of Christian Wolff's seminal open score Edges (1968) as well as its role in the creation of new compositions, such as the multidirectional, dynamic score for the author's own work SECRET ANIMALS (2018). The article assesses the impact of such a technology on performers; what might it feel like – to borrow Karen A. Franck's words – to 'occupy [the score] with [our] entire body' (‘When I enter virtual reality, what body will I leave behind?’, Architectural Design 118: 20–3, 1995). How might these scores build on, alter, or deconstruct conventional performer–audience behaviours? And what impact could implementation of this technology have on both existing open scores and newly created works? Musicologists have often asked: what kind of space is a score? With VR, perhaps a more appropriate question is: what kind of score is a space?

Authors: Packham, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Journal: Performance Research
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 124-129
• Publication date: 2025-12-19
• Acceptance date: 2025-08-08
• DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2024.2537585
• EISSN: 1469-9990
• ISSN: 1352-8165
• Language: English