'Virtuoso' Is A Musical Sandbox That Rethinks Music For VR, Out Now on the Quest Platform

I’m Jonatan Crafoord, the Creative Director of Virtuoso, a VR musical sandbox which we are releasing today on the Rift and Quest Platform! In my previous blog post I told the story of how we realized that Virtuoso was meant for everyone, from tone-deaf music class dropouts to arena headliners alike. But how did we go about developing a VR music app for people who have never played music? And how do we keep it relevant to the more experienced Virtuosos, likely to create the hits that would show everyone else what it is really capable of?

Traditional music comes with a big barrier of entry, and a lot of meat-space baggage. Not only does it take years to learn to play the piano, its flat surface and demands for detailed fingerwork doesn’t exactly cater to the strengths of a VR headset. Luckily, VR has some rather impressive tricks up its sleeve.

With Virtuoso, instead of rebuilding a recording studio in 3D, we decided to get rid of the legacy. Our motto became “innovate, don’t emulate”, and we vowed to always try creating something new before bringing traditional music equipment onto our virtual stage. To make people who are new to music feel welcome we also decided to create features that help them stay in tune and on beat, and we kept music lingo to a minimum. You shouldn’t be expected to know any music theory, or have perfect timing, to become a Virtuoso.

The first instrument we created was the Oorgan. While a piano plays along one axis, left to right, the Oorgan plays along three. Push one button and the keys light up vertically, allowing you to lay down a baseline by moving your hand up and down. Push two others, and you’re adding the horizontal and depth axis, creating a three-dimensional chord. Tilt your controllers and the sound swells and wanes.

The Oorgan comes with the joy of exploring something completely novel regardless of your musical skill level. With keys that automatically tune themselves to the scale of your song, even a beginner can wave their hands around and create sensible melodies. And when we showed the Oorgan to college music students for an upcoming mini-documentary, the mere fact that you could step *into* the instrument to play on it elicited many excited gasps.

Our subsequent creations became gradually simpler, and what we ended up with was a collection of instruments and tools specifically tailored to VR:

• Empads: These drum pads can be moved around, copied, resized and customized for you to build your own floating virtual drum kit. Enable tempo sync to never miss a beat!
• wHarp: Play sweeping chords by dragging your hands across the virtual strings. The further up you play the louder the sound.
• Board: The bread and butter of creating melodies in Virtuoso. Tap a key to play on it, or hold it with one button while grabbing another to play chords. Combine with the arpeggiator effect to have them repeat in sequence.
• Wavemin: Sweep your hands through the air to play freely sliding notes. Play low with the feedback effect to make the house rumble, or high up with the echo effect to make ethereal whale calls.
• Clustr: This one-tap chord machine can provide a backbone to any song, with quick blasts or swelling textures.
• Microphone: Record your voice as you sing, rap or beat-box, with lush reverb.
• Tape Recorder: Captures your full performance and lets you export it as a sound file or share it as a preview in our online song library.
• Looper: The foundation for building songs in Virtuoso, this tool layers and loops your recordings, and can spawn launch pads for triggering and stopping each part in sync with the beat.
• Companion App: Let players with existing music software connect Virtuoso and use our virtual instruments with their production suites.

If VR has the power to do anything, it is to bring us together across distance. Though we are still exploring the future of online collaboration and multiplayer for Virtuoso, we know that the social core of music lies in playing and performing for each other. This is why we built Virtuoso around the idea that you create and record the music while you play and experiment, without ever having to stop the beat. For now, you can stream your performances or share them in our online song library, but rest assured that we are working towards a future where you can also play music together in VR.

Virtuoso is out today on the Quest Store for $19.99 USD with cross-buy support for Rift, and regardless of your previous experiences with creating music, or lack thereof, we can’t wait to hear what you will make once you step into our musical sandbox!