Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) brings radical new possibilities to the empirical study of social music cognition and interaction. In the present article, we consider the role of VR as a research tool, based on its potential to create a sense of “social presence”: the illusory feeling of being, and socially interacting, inside a virtual environment. This makes VR promising for bridging ecological validity (“research in the wild”) and experimental control (“research in the lab”) in empirical music research. A critical assumption however is the actual ability of VR to simulate real-life social interactions, either via human-embodied avatars or computer-controlled agents. The mediation of social musical interactions via VR is particularly challenging due to their embodied, complex, and emotionally delicate nature. In this article, we introduce a methodological framework to operationalize social presence by a combination of factors across interrelated layers, relating to the performance output, embodied co-regulation, and subjective experiences. This framework provides the basis for the proposal of a pragmatic approach to determine the level of social presence in virtual musical interactions, by comparing the outcomes across the multiple layers with the outcomes of corresponding real-life musical interactions. We applied and tested this pragmatic approach via a case-study of piano duet performances of the piece Piano Phase composed by Steve Reich. This case-study indicated that a piano duet performed in VR, in which the real-time interaction between pianists is mediated by embodied avatars, might lead to a strong feeling of social presence, as reflected in the measures of performance output, embodied co-regulation, and subjective experience. In contrast, although a piano duet in VR between an actual pianist and a computer-controlled agent led to a relatively successful performance output, it was inadequate in terms of both embodied co-regulation and subjective experience.
Highlights
Virtual reality (VR) encompasses a plethora of technologies to create new environments, or simulate existing ones, via computer-generated multisensory displays (Sutherland, 1968; Taylor, 1997; Scarfe and Glennerster, 2019)
In the remainder of the article, we focus on a fundamental prerequisite for establishing the advocated VR-based research method; namely, the idea that VR can create a sense of social presence
IOI variability was comparable across conditions with a higher variability for the Agent condition [(mean, STD)IOIvar equaled (7.47, 3.63)Human condition (HC), (7.26, 3.41)Avatar condition (AvC), and (12.55, 2.73)AgC ms]
Summary
Virtual reality (VR) encompasses a plethora of technologies to create new environments, or simulate existing ones, via computer-generated multisensory displays (Sutherland, 1968; Taylor, 1997; Scarfe and Glennerster, 2019). VR typically aims at making its mediation invisible, creating for users the illusory feeling of nonmediation; a feeling coined with the concept of “presence” (Lombard and Ditton, 1997; Riva, 2006) This concept of presence may encompass multiple categories, related to the physical environment, the user’s own body, as well as its social environment. The first category – physical presence or telepresence – pertains to the illusory feeling for users of being present in another environment than the one they are physically in (Minksy, 1980; Sheridan, 1992; Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016) Another category, selfpresence is rooted in the capacity of VR to map the physical body movements of a user onto the moving body of a virtual avatar. (bodily) acting within a virtual social context may create a sense of being together (co-presence), or interacting with others (social presence) while being physically remote (Short et al, 1976; Garau et al, 2005; Parsons et al, 2017; Oh et al, 2018)
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