Practice · Research Thread
Music on Ambiguous Reality
Under what conditions does an audience accept, productively inhabit, or reject a technologically constructed presence as authentic in the co-present concert?
The Authenticity Angle
This thread places the authenticity question at the centre of the work’s dramatic material. Audiences and performers share physical space, but technological augmentation introduces ambiguity about the nature and status of what is perceived. In Simulacra, performers become simulacra of prerecorded performances. In Lost in Plain Sight, schizophrenic perceptual instability is simultaneously the subject and the technique. In the forthcoming Breach of Contract, the conditions of authenticity become the explicit research object, tested empirically through the Mediatised Authenticity Contract.
Throughout, the premise is that mediatised culture has already habituated audiences to engaging with constructed presence. These works make this condition compositionally explicit within the live, co-present concert — creating a zone of productive ambiguity where presence is neither fully real nor fully virtual.
Works
Lost in Plain Sight (2023–2024)
Chamber opera for soprano, two mezzo-sopranos, baritone, chamber ensemble, tape, and Mixed Reality electronics · Libretto by Patrick Leroux
A mixed-reality chamber opera developed from the composer’s personal account of auditory and visual hallucination associated with schizophrenia. The piece’s dramatic subject and its compositional technique are isomorphic: both are about the indistinguishability of real and virtual. Mixed reality cannot function as scenographic enhancement — it functions as a compositional parameter with its own temporal arc, escalation toward crisis, and resolution.
The cast creates a hierarchy from physically real to purely virtual: the soprano (stable physical identity), two mezzo-sopranos as hallucinated Avatars who gradually materialise from offstage voices to full physical presence, a baritone as external reality, and tape voices with no stage presence at all. Two inverse trajectories structure the drama: the Avatars move from virtual to physical while the Self’s body is rendered as a dissolving point-cloud silhouette through holographic gauze projection.
1st Prize, GroundSwell 2025 Emerging Composers Competition · World premiere (concert version): Opér’Actuel 2024, Chants Libres / Paramirabo, Montréal
Mixed Reality version
Concert version
Simulacra (2022)
Five cellos, electronics, and video · 33 min · Commissioned by CIRMMT
The piece asks what constitutes an authentic live concert in the post-pandemic age. It blurs the boundary between physical performers and their audiovisual simulacra across four sections: genesis of an original, accumulation of copies, overflow of simulacra, and a return to bare presence. The five cellists wear masks, move between on- and offstage, and are doubled by prerecorded video, 3D computer graphics, and synthesised cello sounds. By the third section, the real performers have disappeared; only simulacra remain.
Three continua structure the unfolding: visible/invisible, audible/inaudible, and active/inactive (action-sound coupling). Their combination enables scenes where sound is audible with the performer invisible, where a performer is visible but miming silently, or where a synthesised cello plays with no causal body onstage. Simulacra predates and predicts the departure into mixed-reality composition that followed in Lost in Plain Sight.
Live@CIRMMT, Montreal, 2022 · ZKM Kubus, Karlsruhe, 2022 · Riot Ensemble, Tung Auditorium, Liverpool, 2023
Key Concepts
- Mediatised Authenticity Contract (MAC) — a three-state model describing the audience’s perceptual relationship with technologically constructed presence: transparency (hologram grouped seamlessly with the acoustic environment), liminality (perceptual oscillation between integration and separation), and collapse (hologram categorised as non-authentic). The productive aesthetic state is liminality.
- Liminal authenticity — the ambiguous perceptual state where presence is neither fully accepted nor fully rejected, but productively inhabited. This is where the quasi-real operates.
- RV continuum as temporal arc — the reality–virtuality continuum treated not as a static spectrum but as a compositional parameter with its own dramaturgical trajectory across a piece’s duration.
- Ontological stratification as casting principle — assigning voices to positions along the real–virtual continuum as a structural decision analogous to orchestration.
- Isomorphism of subject and technique — when the work’s subject matter and its compositional method are structurally identical, as in Lost in Plain Sight where schizophrenic perceptual instability is both the drama and the MR technique.
Publications
- Fukuda, T. Simulacra. D.Mus. dissertation, McGill University, 2023.