On 23 March 2021, FSNI Future Tuesdays and Performance Without Barriers hosted Zach Kinstner, CEO of Aesthetic Interactive for a presentation and Q & A about the musical VR programme EXA: The Infinite Instrument. EXA is a programme for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens. In the presentation, Zach discussed his experience of developing for the virtual musical environments in Virtual and Mixed Realities.
‘Performance Without Barriers’ (PwB) is a research group at Queen’s University Belfast, established in 2015 by Dr Franziska Schroeder in collaboration with the Drake Music Project Northern Ireland. Together, they work with disabled people to identify more accessible and open ways to designing music technologies. They hold a firm belief that music, performance, and improvisation are powerful mediums for expression and communication across difference, as performance can give a voice to individuals in society who are marginalised and remain ‘silent’ because their language or mode of communication cannot be heard. For that purpose, the PwB team is committed to research activities that promote social inclusion through creative performance practice, accessible and enabling technologies, while challenging dominant assumptions or exclusive identities.
In 2018, as part of the AHRC/EPSRC funded project 'Immersion and Inclusive Music Technologies’, they joined forces with Zach Kinstner’s EXA: The Infinite Instrument programme, which offers a customisable tool for music interactions in Virtual Reality. It was adopted and re-designed by PwB to be an accessible virtual musical instrument for the disabled musicians who are so integral to the design processes.
The work of the PwB teams has been showcased at two European music conferences for disability, the Soundform Conference in Hamburg/Germany, and Zukunftmusik in Bern/Switzerland in 2019.
The agenda-setting research of the group was recognised by the Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast with the 2020 Prize for Research Innovation!
Zach Kinstner, CEO of Aesthetic Interactive. A musician and developer who created the musical VR programme EXA, The Infinite Instrument for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens who will discuss his experience of developing for the virtual musical environments in Virtual and Mixed Realities.
Dr Franciska Schroeder is a saxophonist, theorist, and a Reader at the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen's University Belfast. She is a Fellow of the HEA (Higher Education Academy in the UK). She serves on the peer review panel for the UK's AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and is a registered expert for the EU's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Franziska was awarded her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2006, and has since written for many international journals, including Leonardo, Organised Sound, Performance Research, Cambridge Publishing and Routledge. She has published a book on performance and the threshold, an edited volume on user-generated content and a book on improvisation entitled "Soundweaving".
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