Immersive Publishing Ltd Reveals Cultural Debut of Augmented Reality and Music

Immersive Publishing Ltd works with clients and their content, adding augmented reality (AR) to the printed book and print material with a layer of AR function in audio, video, text, illustrations, and three-dimension.

We are delighted to announce our collaboration with Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley and her award-winning printed Visual Listening Guides (www.symphonygraphique.com) to launch a ground-breaking augmented reality music-paired-with-print project.

The Visual Listening Guide offers orchestral audiences a pioneering way to discover symphonic works in a visually engaging and comprehensible manner, regardless of musical background. Created by musicologist Hannah Chan-Hartley, the Guide’s distinctive blend of graphics, colour, and text aims to help structure listening—and thus deepen understanding—of the music. The unique design of the Visual Listening Guide reveals the framework of a symphonic work, so you know how to listen to it. Designed to be used during a live performance at one's discretion or for at-home listening with any audio or video recording, the Guide is like a roadmap to the piece, indicating important sonic landmarks and other features. It gives a ‘big picture’ view of the work’s form, showing when main musical themes and motives first appear, are developed, and recur within a movement and/or the entire symphonic work, helping to navigate listening. The Guides have enjoyed great success published in the concert programmes for a number of international symphony orchestras.    

Adding augmented reality to the Visual Listening Guides

In an exciting development, we paired the printed Visual Listening Guide with Immersive Publishing’s augmented reality system to create a uniquely engaging experience for audiences to dive more deeply into a symphonic piece, by launching digital content including audio and video clips, images, and text panels onto phone and tablet screens. This system is completely customizable by orchestras with their own recordings for audio clips, as well as their own digital content featuring their musicians, and music scholars and other specialists. There’s no limit to the amount of AR content that can be added to the printed Guide, and media clips can be as long as required.  

With our innovative augmented reality combination, the Guide further empowers orchestras and their audiences to connect more directly with each other and enhance understanding of the music. Our video illustrates how it works: 

Video: The AR Visual Listening Guides 

The AR Visual Listening Guide debut

The Verbier Festival (Switzerland), an annual international classical music event, featured the printed Visual Listening Guides in 2018 and 2022, and for the 30th anniversary edition in 2023, as part of UNLTD--the Verbier Festival's creative lab--we were delighted to launch the AR Visual Listening Guide with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5:  The Verbier Festival AR Visual Listening Guide.   For this AR debut, the Visual Listening Guide’s printed pages are brought to life with audio excerpts from the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra’s own recording (recently released on Deutsche Grammophon), plus digital content, featuring the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra Music Director GáborTakács-Nagy and music historian Jan Swafford, as well as the Orchestra’s musicians.

The AR Visual Listening Guides mark a significant moment in the cultural application of augmented reality, and herald future partnerships between AR and the arts.

For more information visit: Immersive Publishing Ltd and Symphony Graphique