What's On

Speakers

Dr Toby Young Guildhall School of Music and Drama

About

This talk explores the interaction between operatic form and extended-reality (XR) storytelling, investigating how opera’s heightened affect and sustained emotions can function as a dramaturgical resource for immersive media, and proposing that opera’s ‘slow storytelling’ (Taylor 2016) can counter prevailing tendencies toward fragmentation in digital environments. As a central case study, the paper discusses LuciaVR: a virtual reality reimagining of the ‘mad scene’ from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. LuciaVR situates the audience within Lucia’s psyche, using spatialised sound to collapse distinctions between environment and interior voice, shifting the operatic voice from its conventional position of mediated distance to one of intimacy. The experience focuses viewers on psychological interiority rather than external spectacle, producing a first-person encounter with Lucia’s breakdown articulated through a fractured sonic architecture. The paper positions this strategy as a feminist and phenomenological intervention and engages theories of attunement (Ahmed 2006), attentional economy (Citton 2017), immersive dramaturgy (Machon 2013), and acousmatic listening (Chion 1994).

Biography
Toby Young is Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His research focuses on the intersections of music, performance, and technology, with a particular interest in immersive and interactive theatre. As the Music Supervisor of Punchdrunk, he has contributed to soundtracks for a range of TV and stage works including BAFTA-nominated productions for HBO and Sky Arts. He currently leads Immersive Opera, a £1.4 million research initiative exploring extended reality (XR) and interactive storytelling in opera, which investigates the dramaturgical functions of musicality in immersive environments and aims to bridge theoretical inquiry with practical application in opera making.

Tickets
Free admission, no ticket required

This event will end at approximately 5.30pm.