[The current iteration of inventor and musician Bill Sebastian’s “Outerspace Visual Communicator” combines a music synthesizer with virtual reality to create a unique presence-evoking immersive media experience, as described in this story from WBUR. Visit the original version to listen to the story and for a second image and three videos. For more about the OVC, visit the Visual Music Systems website. –Matthew]

[Image: The audience experience at the Boston Immersive Music Festival with Julian Loida performing with Bill Sebastian. Credit: Courtesy Rose Sebastian]

Virtual reality meets music in an inventor’s cosmic dream

By Amelia Mason
October 17, 2024

On an evening in September, about 25 people filled Boston Cyberarts, a small gallery space adjoining the Green Street stop on the Orange Line in Jamaica Plain. Trains rumbled underfoot as the audience took their seats, examining the virtual reality headsets laid out for them on plastic folding chairs.

Bill Sebastian sat at the front of the gallery next to a large projection on the wall, looking futuristic in a black headset and holding a controller in each hand. The lights dimmed, and in the far corner vibraphonist Julian Loida began a questioning refrain. Sebastian lifted his arms as if he was steering an invisible ship, and the glowing images projected on the wall began to move. Abstract and phosphorescent, the transmuting figures sometimes evoked familiar shapes: squid tentacles, a dragon rearing its head, an orb of yellow flower petals like a cocoon. The same landscape was visible inside our visors, rendered in three dimensions, the images seeming to pass over and around us before receding into dark, infinite space.

The audience was abuzz after the show. It was likely many people’s first encounter with VR. Caleb Iyamu, a student at Boston College, summed up the experience this way: “I was like, bro, this has to be God. This is insane.”

The show was the first in a series of fall concerts, billed as the Boston Immersive Music Festival, with Sebastian and his “visual synthesizer” at its center. He calls his invention the Outerspace Visual Communicator, or OVC.

The OVC is very much Sebastian’s life’s work. It is, in one sense, a relic of 1970s futurism, and in another sense a cutting-edge application of virtual reality technology. It is, in every sense, a realization of its inventor’s lifelong obsession with creating an instrument that allows him to express visual ideas with the same ease and intuition as music — a synthesizer that allows him to “play” with light as if it is sound.

Sebastian first came up with the idea for the OVC in the 1970s. Born in Texas, he came to Boston to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but dropped out.

“I was living in the Fort Hill area,” Sebastian recalled in an interview. “Which was just an enclave of misfits and crazy people.”

A pianist by training, Sebastian played keys in an R&B band called the Johnson Brothers. (The band included the producer Maurice Starr, who later founded New Kids on the Block, and his brother Michael Jonzun, who went on to found the pioneering hip-hop group the Jonzun Crew.) Sebastian became fascinated by the way he was able to lose himself in the flow state of performance and wondered how he might extend that experience.

“As a musician, after you learn your instrument for, really, thousands and thousands of hours of playing, you no longer have to think about what your hands are doing or how you’re making the sounds,” he explained. “I just started thinking, like, wouldn’t it be cool to do that for visuals?”

Sebastian was, in his own telling, “born to be an engineer.” The first OVC took him five years to create. It consisted of a honeycomb of colored spotlights behind a 12-foot-tall hexagonal screen that, in its visual elegance, belied the masses of complex wiring required to power it. Sebastian operated the contraption by moving his hands, painterlike, across a touch switchboard while operating pedals with his feet.

In an era when rock bands performed with laser shows and huge lighting rigs, the OVC was more bespoke. It caught the interest of Sun Ra, the pioneering jazz musician known for his experimental music and cosmic ethos.

“I realized he’s the one person on earth who would understand what it was I was trying to achieve,” Sebastian said of the first time he saw Sun Ra perform. “It was very clear that he was going to other worlds and … communicating back from these worlds.”

In the late ‘70s, Sebastian performed the OVC onstage with Sun Ra and his band, improvising psychedelic light shows alongside the musician’s futuristic jazz. The two shared an understanding of the OVC as an integral part of the band, a visual analog to the sax or the drums.

“He understood what I was doing as a musical instrument, and he didn’t want me just to listen to the music and interpret what I was hearing,” Sebastian recalled. “He wanted me to play something different.”

The approach occasionally led to strange moments onstage, like when Sun Ra would point to Sebastian to take a solo.

“The whole band would quit playing sounds and the only thing happening would be the visuals. Which was a little awkward,” Sebastian said. “You’re just hearing everybody cough and shuffle in their seats and stuff.”

Sebastian built an upgraded version of the OVC in the ‘80s, which was featured in two videos Sun Ra produced of his band performing. (An album of previously unpublished music from that recording session, called “Inside the Light World,” was released earlier this year by the U.K. label Strut Records.)

But Sebastian dreamed of a visual experience that was totally enveloping. The advancement of VR headsets in the 2010s finally made that possible. After selling off a tech company he founded, Sebastian set to work building a team to help him realize his dream. Seven years later, and pretty much out of money, he debuted the third version of the OVC in 2018.

The OVC’s convergence of tech and creativity piqued the interest of Boston Cyberarts, which was founded in 1996 to promote artists working in the digital realm and helped launch the careers of prominent multimedia artists such as Will Pappenheimer and Tamiko Thiel.

“Everything we try to do, we try to do examples of unique kinds of interactivity in art,” said Kevin Cavanaugh, the chair of the Boston Cyberarts board. The Boston Immersive Music Festival is characteristically ambitious, unfolding over multiple weekends from mid-September through Oct. 26. Each concert pairs Sebastian with a different Boston-area musician, from jazz saxophonists to a tabla player, and on a few evenings, he jams with recorded music by his old collaborator Sun Ra.

But Sebastian never meant for the OVC to remain an avant-garde curiosity. Though he ran out of funds before he was able to take the product to market, his original aim was to make the OVC available to the public. The software is customizable, much like an audio synthesizer. Anyone could design their own OVC practically from the ground up.

“We imagined millions of people doing this,” Sebastian said. “There’d be whole markets for people to develop these and creating common building blocks and sharing them.”

It’s likely people would use the technology in ways its inventor never intended. But Sebastian imagines some would take up the challenge to master the OVC like a musical instrument. He dreams of directing an orchestra, a dozen players all plugged in, each imprinting their own sensibility on the OVC’s infinite visual world.