Original story

Review in Compumedia Arts Digest 14.4.2018

The discreet charm of the invisible instrument

Yesterday’s “invisitron” concert in Dallas left the audience stunned. Jack Michaelson is revolutionizing the way we experience music.

It is not often that this columnist is lost for words, but the concert arranged by Passport PLC in a disused downtown industrial lot in Dallas yesterday came very close. For a start, the choice of venue was masterly: the city’s old Elm St. Industry Park, which has been allowed to return in the wake of the post-industrial revolution to a series of picturesque ruins set amidst grassy knolls and young trees. Interestingly enough, the concert was non-virtual, in that it was not distributed simultaneously through the datanets. The reason was that Passport have had one or two system teething troubles, and have not yet been able to produce hologram facsimiles for some of the concert elements.

The concert programme was put together with excellent taste from original recordings deriving from two different eras. Before the interval, we were treated to examples of music from the 19th and 20th centuries, while the second half was devoted to works by contemporary auteurs.

The proceedings opened in almost pastoral fashion with the arrival behind the invited audience of a 3-D pine forest, from the depths of which came the rich creamy sounds of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s D major Violin Concerto, composed 140 years ago this year. It is perhaps worth noting for younger readers that in the 19th and 20th centuries (and of course even before that time), compositions such as this were first written down on paper and then performed physically by large groups of individual musicians known as “symphony orchestras”. The solo violin was also played by a physical individual, in this instance the Russian Oleg Kagan, and he was accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The piece was naturally recorded using very old analog technology, but nevertheless the sounds swelling out from the massed ranks of trees did have a certain charm, even if the rather archaic style of the music and the age of the recording were clearly evident. The generally pleasing overall effect was complemented by Stephanie Spielberg’s hommage to a past era in the form of a hologram ballet, complete with forest sprites and goblins.

The second early work we were treated to was from a different genre, the short “pop music” ballad Michelle by The Beatles, a four-piece English ensemble popular towards the latter half of the 20th century. The simple music and the ethereal 3-D show that accompanied it, revolving slowly above the audience’s heads, had a magnetic attraction, which was immediately obvious from the loud and sustained applause and calls for an encore. I have heard fragments of this tune in the past in synthesized versions used in one or two high-speed elevators and multimedia advertisements, but this was the first time I had been able to enjoy the original recording. Apparently The Beatles were enormously successful during the 1960s, and whilst the music had its limitations, clearly the members were talented and somewhat ahead of their time.

The second half of the concert began in total darkness, and then gradually on the left hand wall and above us there appeared the sky as seen from the surface of Mars. From somewhere high above our heads, those familiar crashing chord clusters heralded the opening of the Space Girls’ long concerto I Wanna Make Love To You Baby Till I’m Blue In The Face On That Red Planet. The Girls themselves descended from a point in the centre of the Martian horizon and hovered over the audience. Their teasing artificial skin show (if it WAS artificial…) produced a storm of cheering and wolf-whistles, which was immediately recorded in the International Musicology Centre’s memobank and lifted the group’s market index by a full 8 points.

Before the final number, the developer of the “invisitron” Jack Michaelson came on to demonstrate the device. The visible elements of the instrument are a series of sound generators, which produce various ultrasound walls or overhanging wings. The ultrasound impulses act both as carrier waves, which when modulated allow the sound to travel along them, and as horizontal or vertical surfaces, from which the sound appears to be projected. By altering the angles and shapes of the surfaces, the sound can be made to seem as though it is all around one, close at hand, or even plunging downwards from kilometres above the audience.

When Michaelson then powered up the invisitron to play his own Virtual Dreams, a work originally written on a hand-composer, the impression was of sounds coming from the most astonishing places and directions. For me, the climax was a fortissimo section where the melody in the high register appeared simultaneously to be projected from a point roughly at arm’s length and from several kilometres above my head, while the underlying bass motif came echoing at me from all sides at once. I can safely say that I have never experienced such a thrilling audio-spatial experience, even going beyond the so-called “mindfogging” sensations that can be achieved with some of the illegal psycho-servers.

All in all, the experience was a very pleasant surprise. It comfortably beat almost all my virtual trips to date. Whilst it is still early days for the device, I would imagine that the invisitron has a great future - particularly if Passport can overcome their virtual problems, and if one of the large media concerns can take it up and shape it into a suitably simple, portable, and commercially attractive product for consumers.

Toteuma-arvio 2026

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  • Toteuma väljemmällä aikahorisontilla: kyllä, erittäin vahvasti
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Elektroninen musiikki, tilaääni, virtuaaliartistit, hologrammikonsertit ja immersiiviset installaatiot ovat toteuttaneet näkymättömän instrumentin kokemuksen. Yksittäinen tekninen toteutustapa vaihtelee, mutta esitysmuoto on tunnistettava.

Johtopäätös: ennusteen taiteellinen ja tekninen ydin toteutui olennaisilta osin.