News

MusicFutures has announced two successful projects from the Liverpool City Region that have been awarded funding through the Future Live Fan Experiences Call.

Delivered in partnership with XR Network+ and the Liverpool Experience Campus (LEX); the R&D challenge has awarded grants of up to £25,000 for university-led and SME-led projects to develop and test new fan experiences across live music, sport and cultural events.

The challenge looks to respond to the rapid transformation taking place in the live events sector driven by advances in immersive technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and next-generation connectivity.

Director of MusicFutures, Professor Richard Koeck expanded:

“MusicFutures is supporting these projects to explore how immersive technologies and next-generation connectivity can open up new forms of audience participation and reshape the live music experience.”

As part of the MusicFutures strand of the call, projects will also have access to real-world venue testbeds, including the cutting-edge high bandwidth 5G OpenRAN connectivity available through LEX.

MusicFutures is supporting the following 2 projects: 

Stealing Sheep: GIRLGANTUA / A New Live Performance Strategy

Electro-Pop group Stealing Sheep are reimagining live performance through real-time digital puppetry, fan participation, and Scouse K-Pop.

Stealing Sheep are developing a new live performance strategy where musicians directly puppeteer digital characters and visual worlds in real time, exploring real-time motion capture, experimental sound design, and immersive 3D animation. How participatory fan experiences can shape future immersive performance formats will also be investigated; through audio samples collected from fans to create a collective “super chord” embedded with the sound design of the performer.

To test this, the project will develop a new musical sub genre: Scouse K-Pop in the form of group GIRLGANTUA. Fusing Liverpool’s rich musical history with K-Pop’s multimedia spectacle of music, fashion, choreography, fan participation and storytelling – the sub genre will reimagine local music culture with a futuristic lens, amplifying women in music and becoming simultaneously local and global, accessible and innovative.

Scott Jones Studio: FanField / A Crowd API

FanField turns the energy of a crowd into a creative material.

A new crowd-response framework that enables the collective behaviour of an audience to shape live experiences in real time. Using a browser-based mobile interface, audiences join a shared “Fan Field” through their devices. Rather than focusing on individual interactions, the system looks for patterns of flocking emerging across the crowd through collective movement, intensity, rhythm and moments of synchronised participation.

These behaviours are interpreted anonymously and translated into signals that can transform lighting, sound, projection, XR and other responsive live systems. A crowd moving together; a sudden surge in energy; moments of synchrony could shift the visual and sonic environments triggering entirely new states within a performance. At its heart, FanField turns crowd data into part of the experience, rather than an analytical after thought after an event – building the audience as an active, expressive layer within the show.

XR Network+ is supporting the following two projects:

Resonant Rooms: Audience-responsive sculptural sound for festivals and live events

The University of the West of England is developing an audience-responsive spatial audio system for festivals and live events. The project is in collaboration with experimental artists Copper Sounds and Undershed, Watershed’s immersive gallery in Bristol.

Sounding bodies: An immersive and responsive environment for participatory classical music performance

The Royal College of Art is exploring how immersive and responsive environments can transform the way young people encounter and perform classical music. The project is in partnership with Kingston School of Art and ARCO – Music for All, a community music charity in Islington working with Gen Alpha children from Global Majority backgrounds, including SEN/D learners and children from low-income families.

Funded projects began on 1^st October 2026 and will run through to March 2027.