How Las Vegas’ Sphere is inspiring fulldome performances around the globeDid the roof of the Sphere in Las Vegas really open up a little bit, at the exact moment a helicopter flew immediately overhead? The 20,000-strong U2 audience inside the venue saw it, we heard it, and we felt it, so it certainly seems like it happened. Even now, I’m not so sure whether it was technical trickery or U2’s Bono making a dramatic entrance.

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Just as the best tech is indistinguishable from magic, any digital aircraft appearing on Sphere’s 15,000 m2 16k resolution immersive screen – accompanied by spatial audio from 1,600 speakers – is impossible to distinguish from a real one.
Add the haptic seating that rumbles on cue, the wind machines, and a way to diffuse scent around the space, and this is a place where all your senses can deceive you and transport you to another world altogether.
U2 are the first act to have a residency at Sphere’s new immersive screen venue and – in the same way any big-budget stadium show might have big-screen artwork for every song – this show has vast wraparound worlds. Visuals have been custom-made for the show by a range of artists including George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, who were responsible for ABBA Voyage.
U2 performing at the Sphere in Las Vegas on September 30, 2023. Image: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation
While the outside of the venue is very much tied to artwork having a dome-shaped appearance, inside the venue the visual art can make the dome shape completely disappear, turning it into either an infinite space or an even smaller one.
Throughout the show, we’re taken through landscapes both realistic and fantastical. A giant flag burns in the desert; a gleaming ball floats in the ocean; a giant tower of code becomes a cube-shaped room with a ceiling threatening to crush us. There’s even a section of the show with live-action footage of Las Vegas itself, so crisp it looks like the outside has suddenly become the inside.
One particular highlight is artwork by Italian-Canadian artist Marco Brambilla, which sees a scrolling collage of famous Vegas scenes make its way down the screen so we can spot landmarks, Elvis and characters from Showgirls as U2 belt out Even Better Than The Real Thing. At other times, the screen simply shows close-ups of the band’s faces a few storeys high.
U2 performing at the Sphere in Las Vegas in front of ‘King Size’, a work created by Marco Brambilla using generative AI technology. Image: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation
It’s the largest, most technologically advanced, and most talked about venue and show of its kind. But what’s happening at Sphere is not an entirely new art form, nor is Vegas the only place you can see live performances and immersive visuals inside a dome screen. This kind of venue and experience is often called ‘fulldome’, and it has a creative community who have been working away for decades to bring it to new audiences and to recruit new talent.
Fulldome simply means a piece of film or performance made for a dome-shaped screen. It includes the immersive space and science films in planetariums, but there’s a whole world of art and cultural films and performances for fulldome that have nothing to do with space or science.
Sometimes fulldome is only a film. Sometimes it’s a live performance with immersive visuals inside a dome. While its arena-like scale and new curved LED technology makes Sphere a completely new beast, other smaller venues use projectors to achieve a similar effect.
Some of these purely artistic fulldome shows can be seen in planetariums if they have the resources and interest to show them. When they do, it can work wonderfully. The Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston, for example, now has an evening fulldome programme including music and drag performance that’s become so successful it subsidises the planetarium’s space and science activity. In the UK, Dynamic Earth planetarium in Edinburgh has programmed fulldome art films during the Fringe, and We The Curious planetarium in Bristol has hosted VJing and fulldome films during the music festival Simple Things.
U2 performing during the opening night of U2: UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere in Las Vegas on September 29, 2023. Image: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation
There are also fulldome venues around the world which are, like Vegas’ Sphere, dedicated to arts and culture rather than to space and science. The Vortex dome opened in LA in 2010, hosting anything from ballet to EDM parties. The pandemic closed that particular dome, but the team behind it are now working to open a network of permanent fulldome venues.
Wisdome opened in LA from 2018-2023 as a fulldome park filled with temporary domes up to 700-person capacity in size. Opening with trippy Android Jones film Samskara and the accompanying art exhibition, it also hosted gigs, gong baths and meditation sessions. Wisdome also cheekily popped up as an unofficial addition to SXSW 2022, where it set up a dome park outside the Austin Convention Center and put on a whole programme of live music and fulldome film.
The Satosphere (SAT) in Montreal, Canada, is one of the most well-respected fulldome venues in the world. Located at the Society for Arts and Technology, it’s a lab that offers artist residencies for the creation of new fulldome art. SAT is unusual in the fulldome world because it has full floor-to-ceiling projection. Think of a planetarium, with its screen beginning at about head height, or Sphere where a large section of the wall is covered by the rows of seating. Instead, SAT is nothing but a dome-shaped screen down to the floor and around the space, with no permanent seating, giving the effect of total immersion, as well as total flexibility for artists to try out new things.
Art historian and curator Sir Nicholas Serota at Devonport Market Hall’s 360 immersive dome in Plymouth. Image: Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images
There are currently two venues in the UK dedicated to fulldome art. Market Hall in Plymouth is modelled on SAT in Montreal, with floor-to-ceiling immersion. It’s a place where fulldome art can be both seen and made, all inside a historic building repurposed for creative business. CultVR in Cardiff is an artist-run experimental venue and lab with late-night events and live music, and its dome is suspended from the ceiling inside a warehouse on the outskirts of the city.
A dome can be used as scenography, a canvas, or a cinema screen. It can incorporate interactivity from wearable tech, motion sensors, game controllers and audio input. Added to this, audiences are put inside the screen rather than simply watching it, and that makes it a fun tool for artists to play with.
One musician who’s recently created a show for fulldome venues is British turntablist DJ Yoda, aka Duncan Beiny, who saw the potential to use this immersive screen to create a new kind of experience for audiences at his AV shows. After taking part in a lab event run by Live Cinema UK* at the CultVR dome, he developed a fulldome version of his existing show with new visuals created just for the dome.
The Sphere in Las Vegas during the opening night of U2: UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere on September 29, 2023. Image: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
“I started off working with just audio,” says Beiny, “and then I started working with video. My whole interest in DJing has been about what other places you can push it and where else you can take it with technology.
“At one point I thought to myself, ‘3D might be an interesting thing to investigate or holographic stuff or projection mapping’. But when I saw the dome at Cardiff, it made me realise that it’s a really interesting way to make the video infinitely more immersive than a 2D screen in front of you.
“I work with samples a lot, especially video samples from YouTube and from movies,” he adds. “But I feel like the dome aspect allows you to make that much more immersive and much more about environment. For instance, I’ve done a lot of stuff with Stranger Things, the [Netflix] show, and previously I would have taken clips from Stranger Things and used that in an audiovisual show. But with the dome, I can actually put people in The Upside Down [a concept in the show], like in the actual kind of environment.”
Existing shows for fulldome are many and varied, featuring film, dance, theatre, repurposed virtual reality, immersive games and live music. The fulldome community in the UK is particularly strong; as well as having two UK fulldomes, a lot of creative work for fulldome is produced in the UK, and the Fulldome UK Festival is one of the most respected events in the world dedicated to the art.
The Sphere lights up for the first time in Las Vegas in celebration of Independence Day on July 4, 2023. Image: Greg Doherty/Getty Images
The fulldome community was full of excitement about the opening of Las Vegas’ Sphere, and its potential to make people aware of fulldome through its huge marketing campaigns. The outside of Sphere, with its dome-shaped LED screen measuring 112m high and 157m wide, has provided an ever-changing light show to passers-by, whether they’re on foot or in a plane. We’ve seen the Sphere’s exterior as a giant emoji watching people fly in and out of Vegas, as a huge basketball, a pumpkin, a monstrous eyeball, a cat playing with lasers, the list goes on.
But it was for this reason that Sadiq Khan just shot down the idea that London will have its own Sphere. Light pollution might be a non-issue in Vegas, but it doesn’t work so well in residential cities. Without the glowing exterior, Sphere can’t charge advertisers, and the Vegas model may not work. This hasn’t deterred the Mayor of Tees Valley from reaching out to Sphere operators the Madison Square Garden Entertainment Company (MSG) to start the massive ball rolling on a Sphere in Teesside.
Regardless of whether we see a Sphere venue open in the UK, we can expect fulldome in general to grow as more people realise its potential for all kinds of performance. Planetariums, temporary domes and new fulldome venues are all still available, and there’s a global network of fulldome obsessives ready to ride the wave Sphere has set in motion.
*[Editor’s note: Alongside being a contributor to MusicTech, Kate Wellham is also the immersive coordinator at Live Cinema UK]
The post How Las Vegas’ Sphere is inspiring fulldome performances around the globe appeared first on MusicTech.

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XLN Audio’s Life brilliantly transforms the world into a drum kitSick of sample libraries? Bored of generic beats? The inspiration you’ve been looking for, it turns out, might just be hidden in the squeak of a hallway door, the beep of a crossing light, or the hum of a refrigerator. This is the premise behind Life, the new release from Sweden-based developer XLN Audio, creator of the revered RC-20 Retro Colour lo-fi plugin. Life comes with the promise to make personalised percussion out of everyday noise.

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The idea that anything can be music is nothing new; using non-musical sounds as drum samples is a well-worn production trick. What makes Life special is not necessarily the end result – it’s how, and how fast, you get there.

The basic premise is this: using the Life Field Recorder mobile app for iOS and Android, you can go out and capture any noise that piques your interest. You upload the recordings to your XLN account and seamlessly sync to the Life desktop app or DAW plugin. Once there, the recordings you’ve gathered are automatically analysed for salient audio features and, based on this analysis, the file is neatly sliced into segments. But that’s not all; the app ingeniously generates dozens of rhythmic patterns to accompany your new sample instrument.
The whole process of analysing the source file and generating rhythmic patterns takes roughly three seconds on our M2 Macbook Air, and the results are genuinely awesome.
The sound of some street Karaoke in Vietnam becomes a perfect starting point for an EDM track, and rolling the dice to get a second variation lands on something closer to industrial techno. The chugging sound of a washing machine is transformed first into a lazy hip-hop beat, and then into something hard to quantify but enjoyable nonetheless

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SRM Sounds launches new plugin based on producer Max Richter’s own Steinway Model D Spirio | rSRM Sounds are set to release a unique series of virtual instruments for Native Instruments’ Kontakt software – and the first plugin to be shared with the world, The Max Richter Piano plugin, will allow creatives to harness a sound close to the composer’s heart.
Recorded at his countryside studio, Studio Richter Mahr, The Max Richter Piano plugin is built around the sound of Richter’s own Steinway Model D Spirio | r. Comprised of ten dynamic layers spanning from ppp to mf, five layers of round-robins, two varieties of reverb, the plugin is set to replicate every intricate sonic detail of Richter’s grand.

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Every effort was made to accurately capture and sample the grand’s natural, full-bodied sound. With three microphones set up per instrument, the library promises to emulate even the softest of piano tones. It’s also equipped with action, dampers and pedal volume control.
“For composers, sound is an incredibly personal and emotional thing,” Richter explains. “For many of us, the experience of falling in love with the physical and tactile aspects of sound is what got us into music in the first place, so working with sounds that aren’t quite right is really disturbing.”
“Therefore, we decided to make our own Kontakt instrument collection, using the wonderful acoustics and technical resources of Studio Richter Mahr. These instruments have the colours that I love to use to tell the stories I want to tell,” he ays.
“Just like a real acoustic piano, this instrument has its own properties; it is not an ‘everything piano’,” Richter continues. “You wouldn’t perform Prokofiev on a piano that had been set up for Mozart, and the same applies here.”
Created in partnership with ex-Spitfire Audio CEO Will Evans and his new studio Song Athletics, the plugin will truly bring the digital piano to life.
“Max has a unique and revered relationship with sound,” Will Evans comments. “To collaborate with him and Studio Richter Mahr is a real privilege, and I’m excited to help share these inspiring instruments with the world.”
The Max Richter Piano plugin is currently available on SRM Sounds, with an introductory price of £119 until 31 January 2024, after which it will be £149.
For more info, head to SRM Sounds.
The post SRM Sounds launches new plugin based on producer Max Richter’s own Steinway Model D Spirio | r appeared first on MusicTech.

Curious about The John Lennon Songwriting Contest?In honor of John Lennon, The John Lennon Songwriting Contest is an international songwriting contest that began in 1997 to give songwriters an opportunity to express themselves, gain recognition, and get their music heard. The JLSC is made possible by Yoko Ono Lennon.

The contest is open to everyone. Enter your original songs in any of the 12 Categories: Rock, Pop, Hip-Hop, Country, Jazz, R&B, Children's, Folk, World, Latin, Electronic and Gospel/Inspirational.

You don't need a professional recording. Entries will be judged on originality, melody, composition, and lyrics (when applicable).

Each year, judges select 72 Finalists and 24 Grand Prize winners. The Grand Prize winners compete for the 12 Lennon Awards, one of which will be selected "Song of the Year." Click here for a complete list of prizes.

George Clinton, Prince Royce, 311, and Flea are some of the members on our Executive Committee of Judges. Meet the Judges

Proceeds from the contest help support the non-profit John Lennon Educational Tour Busmobile recording studio which is dedicated to providing young people with opportunities to create original music and digital media.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO AND TO ENTER

CONTEST DEADLINE ALERT!

Entries for Session II must be received by December 31st!

Enter your original songs to compete for the enormous 2023 prize list which includes pro gear like Genelec 8030C monitors, an Apogee Duet 3, a pair of Epiphone guitars, Audio-Technica studio mic + headphones, Avid Pro Tools, hot plugins from SSL, Apogee/Clearmountain, and Universal Audio, as well as Reason+ and so much more - including the $20,000 CASH prize for Song of the Year.

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