This PhD project will focus on the development of radically new technologies based on 5G and Multisensory Extended Reality which are capable of truly interconnecting musicians as well as musicians and audiences. Such technologies will allow musicians to perform, rehearse, teach and learn online, and audiences to experience concerts remotely. A system with such capability has several benefits for society and the environment which are relevant for sustainable development. Firstly, it allows to drastically reduce the time and costs for travels, while zeroing any pollution due to travels. This impacts several users and a set of activities, the musical ones, which are widespread across society. Moreover, the proposed system is useful for all situations in which travels are difficult. This includes non-optimal atmospheric conditions, physical disabilities of the users, or the position of the users in geographically isolated areas.The need to conduct musical activities remotely (e.G., live performances, teaching and learning music, rehearsing, recreational music making) has been promoted markedly by the social distance measures posed by the recent worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. However, today it is still impossible to connect musicians as well as audiences over the Internet as in real-life. End-users need real-time solutions that truly give them the feeling of being together in the same environment, sharing the same experience. This is crucial for a successful joint coordination of sounds and movement, and eventually for realising strong feelings of shared musical experience and sense-making.The combined use of 5G and Multisensory Extended Reality technologies have the unexplored potential to cater to musicians and audiences needs by providing low- latency interactions in shared virtual or augmented environments.This PhD project will create multisensory technologies exploiting audio, visual, and haptic stimuli to generate compelling illusions of being present in shared virtual or augmented environments. It will also design, develop and evaluate the resulting musical interactions possible in such environment. For this purpose, we will adopt user-centered design methodologies, in particular participatory design. The project will investigate a wide variety of musical activities. It will also involve a wide user basis which includes amateur and professional musicians and concert-goers, and will consider several diversity factors such as gender, age, and disabilities.

The successful candidate will have a background as a computer scientist as well as will possess musical knowledge. In particular it is required to have competences in human-computer interaction as well as expertise with software frameworks for Virtual Reality and audio processing

The project will be hosted at CIMIL, the Creative, Intelligent and Multisensory Interactions Laboratory. This is a research team of University of Trento lead by the applicant, which is currently composed by 4 PhD students and 1 Postdoc. The PhD candidate will have access to the Multisensory Interactions Laboratories, a research facility composed by two rooms fully equipped with material for audio-based and virtual reality based interactions.The PhD candidate can also count on the expertise of other professors within the Department who have complementary expertise to those of CIMIL researchers, such as Prof. Fabrizio Granelli and Paolo Casari, experts in networks.