Paul M. Christian
A body of work spanning VR installations, mixed reality instruments, homemade controllers, hand-tracked puppetry, and live sound-reactive projection systems.
Selected projects
A stationary recumbent bike transformed into a full-body VR airship controller for REM5's ESC 3.0.
Participants pedaled through a 3D scan of the booth, rose through a collapsed roof into a mountain river world, and steered two virtual propellers with a custom physical control inspired by real human-powered airships.
A sandbox for learning, performing, and exploring alternative instrument layouts and microtonal tuning systems.
The platform turns abstract musical objects into playful, spatial instruments: Tonneggs for additive synthesis, rhythm wheels synced to a DAW, and a continuous virtual theremin with formant control.
A mixed reality theremin with a linear pitch field, visible note positions, and ghost-hand performance cloning.
The app preserves the expressive body feel of a real theremin while using mixed reality to make pitch geography visible and multipart performance more approachable.
A place for refactoring music.
Musicality.computer is the home for my experiments with exotic approaches to working with music theory, alternate notation systems, instrument design, and embodied ways of thinking through sound.
It acts as a host for prototypes, sketches, and playable research: tools that treat theory as something you can touch, move through, retune, and reorganize.
Systems practice
XR prototyping from concept to embodied install
Sensor, controller, and input-device invention
Spatial audio, synthesis, and instrument design
Realtime visual systems for stages and installations
Playful interfaces for learning complex technical ideas
Project index
Web sound toy
A fractal explorer that maps Mandelbrot escape-time values to harmonic overtones and sequences them with a Hilbert curve.
Live visuals
A rear-projection tarp installation where audience silhouettes merged with sound-reactive visuals across a sidewalk.
Live visuals
A multi-projector Processing environment mapped to analog synthesis, using a virtual camera rig across perpendicular projectors.
2014
A Razer Hydra-based VR glove with 6DOF tracking, homemade bend sensors, vibrotactile motors, and custom object interaction software.
2018
Hand-tracked virtual shadow puppets and VFX Graph visuals used as a luminous backlight for Wayang Kulit at Burning Man.
2019
Magic smoke and crystal shards floated around and followed the puppeteer's hand for a Wayang Kulit shadow puppet version of Disney's Raya and the Last Dragon Little Golden Book. When the puppeteer made a fist, the shards magnetically reassembled and released a burst of magic energy.
