Ali Al Housseini, Jaime Llorca, Cristina Rottondi, Luca Turchet, Tiziano Leidi, Omran Ayoub
The Musical Metaverse (MM) enables geographically distributed musicians, audiences, sound engineers, and AI agents to interact through synchronized audio, visual, kinematic, and haptic streams, imposing latency, synchronization, bandwidth, and scalability requirements that are difficult to satisfy with conventional bit-level communication. This paper argues that semantic communication, understood here as the transmission of musically meaningful information rather than raw audio-visual-haptic samples, provides a principled communication paradigm for the MM. We define the MM from a communication perspective and derive modality-specific require ments; propose a three-pillar framework for musical semantic communication comprising semantics extraction, semantic-aware orchestration, and cross-modal semantic synchronization; survey representative work across semantic communication, music AI and edge orchestration, identifying the gaps that prevent their integration; and propose a semantic-first reference architecture based on device-side semantic encoders, edge semantic routers, and cross-modal semantic synchronization. The resulting framework positions the MM as a concrete and demanding use case for 6G semantic communication.
Technology-mediated audience participation (TMAP) enables audiences to influence live performances, yet balancing interaction with meaningful agency remains challenging. While AI-generated music and MR enable new forms of audio and visual audience participation, little is known about how these participation modalities influence audience experiences during live musical performance. In particular, it remains unclear how they shape perceived agency, collaboration, and engagement, and how they complement one another within TMAP systems. We present CrowdForge, an AI- and MR-mediated paradigm where audiences collectively control generative music and virtual environments during a live performance featuring a guitarist and DJ. Through a mixedmethods concert study evaluating three interaction conditions (audio, visual, and combined audio-visual), we demonstrate that observability is the primary driver of audience agency. While visual interaction provided easily observable feedback, audio parameters offered macro-structural control over the music. Audiences tended to use the control enabled by AI audio generation to test musical boundaries, introducing a productive adversarial tension between the crowd and the musicians. This dynamic pushed creative limits, deepened engagement, and generated moments of musical coherence when performers successfully resolved audience-induced challenges. We argue future TMAP systems should prioritize human-centered, highly observable interactions to build agency, while combining the expressiveness of music with the clarity of visual feedback.