You Can Now 'Paint' Music Through Virtual Reality Technology

At a virtual reality hacking competition at MIT this week, a student-led group called Vream developed an application for HTC Vive headsets that allows users to visually compose music.

Vream calls it "Pitch Paint." Users can compose music through game-like visual cues based on shape and color.

’It’s basically a virtual reality experience where you can actually see sound in 3-D space. The main features of the app include being able to draw and paint music in 3-D space, depending on different scales and pitches, and whatnot,’ explained Vream’s Emily Van Belleghem, a student at MIT.

Van Belleghem said she created the technology on the premise that a lot of people have great instincts around musical composition, but learning physical instruments presents a big barrier to entry.

’I wanted to give them some sort of intuitive experience so they could create their music in a space without having to have any of that previous background knowledge,’ she said.

Belleghem envisions two levels of the application: a play mode, and a more advanced mode for serious composers.