Jean-Michel Jarre Performing Live In VR June 21, 2020

Electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre has announced that he will be performing live in virtual reality to celebrate Fête de la Musique 2020, June 21st at 21h15 CET.

Jarre hopes to “send a message to the public and the entire music industry: whether in the real or virtual world, music and live performance have a value”.

The free performance will be available to watch in VR, on Facebook and Youtube.

Here are the details:

Jarre’s custom-created “Alone Together” is a Live performance in virtual reality, simultaneously broadcast in real time across digital platforms, in 3D & 2D. To date, all virtual musical performances are pre-produced and are hosted in pre-existing digital worlds. Here Jarre presents his event in its own customized virtual world and everyone can share the online experience via PC, tablets, smartphones, or in total immersion on interactive VR headsets.

Important to Jarre, this project also aims to send a message to the public and the entire music industry: whether in the real or virtual world, music and live performance have a value, the recognition and sustainability of which is vital for millions of creators.

In addition to the digital broadcast, a “silent” broadcast of the virtual concert will be offered in city-center Paris, in the courtyard of the Palais Royal, to a selection of students from schools of the performing arts, training in sound and image, who will only need to bring their mobile phone and headphones to share the live performance on a big screen.

At the end of this simultaneous performance, the participants gathered in the courtyard of the Palais Royal will be able to chat live with Jean-Michel Jarre’s avatar, erasing even further the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds. To conclude, the avatar will open a virtual backstage door to which Jarre will welcome the group of students in person to his studio to share the behind the scenes of the evening.

Jean-Michel Jarre intends to demonstrate that VR, augmented reality and AI are new vectors that can help create a new mode of artistic expression, production and distribution, while maintaining the unparalleled emotion of the real-time encounter between artists and the public. The period of sanitary crisis we are going through has highlighted the opportunity and the need for a paradigm shift to keep up with the times.

“Having performed in extraordinary venues, virtual reality will now allow me to play in unimaginable spaces while remaining on a physical stage” says Jean-Michel Jarre. “Virtual or augmented realities can be to the performing arts what the advent of cinema was to the theatre, an additional mode of expression made possible by new technologies at a given time,” predicts Jarre.

See Jarre’s site for details.

19 thoughts on “Jean-Michel Jarre Performing Live In VR June 21, 2020

  1. > Jarre hopes to “send a message to the public and the
    > entire music industry: whether in the real or virtual world,
    > music and live performance have a value”.

    His gaze is both glorifying and maudlin IMO.
    No, thank you.
    “You had your time, you had the power”
    (From: Queen – Radio Ga Ga)

    1. JmJ as president of CiSAC been trying years to get musicians to earn more money including you us.

      Remember Musicians have families kids to feed, clothe, send to education, medical bills.

      Don’t you get it,
      JmJ is showing musicians
      there’s another way to earn when you can’t give concerts to real life people.
      If musicians can earn from virtual concerts then this is wonderful for them.

      So what have you we done what has other musicians done to help musicians during covid19, post covid19?.

  2. While it may be neat, it isn’t cheap. Those headsets are about $600, and the new models will arrive two weeks or so after the concert.

  3. This will be far more disappointing to everyone that if they had just done a normal hi-def stream. The reasons are many.

  4. of course, it is always nice to see jarre live. but by giving a concert for *free* he totally contradicts his message that says artists should be paid fairly. a free art performance devalues the value of art imo.

    1. An artist in control of his/her livelihood is the greater issue here, IMHO.

      The ability to give it away is a freedom. The *requirement* to give it away is a burden.

  5. Its an interesting next-gen step to take and I agree that it will become more of a standard, but it will live or die according to how much bandwidth it demands. Even money says many viewers will get frozen frames & the like. The U.S. Internet is a greedy, sluggish disgrace compared to the speeds you can get in many other countries, so YMMV.

    Jarre is one of those who “should” try this, because he’s always been media-minded. We’ll see where some of the weak spots are, but also the possibilities. Someone once said “Today’s CGI is tomorrow’s rear-projection.” I can already smell the “Blade Runner” from here.

    1. Unfortunately it’s just the opposite with VR. Today’s VR is last generations visual graphics standard. The demand of rendering steady high frame rates for each eye independently puts too much demand even on a 2080 ti… no way it can look as good as a “normal” game or animated render. VR will always be behind the visual curve.

    2. this is always the case with bleeding edge technologies… in that the “bandwidth” or the “headroom” is never enough – because it is on the edge of development, by definition…

      its the segment that pushes the boundaries, instead of comfortably working within them

      but you better believe that photorealistic VR will be as commonplace in about 20 years as TV is now… so better get ready for it – and all the issues and opportunities that go along with that

  6. “To date, all virtual musical performances are pre-produced and are hosted in pre-existing digital worlds.”

    In this press release Jarre comes off arrogant and totally out of touch. He’s at least 15 years late on this concept.

  7. It’ll be interesting to see this, in whatever form it takes when I join the stream without any fancy equipment.
    Quite honestly, I hope the music remains #1 here. This isn’t an opera, and virtuosity in electronic music performances – unlike watching, say, Liberace on the piano – is often too subtle to capture the attention of an average viewer. Hence the frequent need for light shows, gimmicks, etc.

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