DreaMR: S. Rachmaninoff Preludes Op. 32 N1- 5 and N10 Mixed Reality (MR) scenes

S. Rachmaninoff is a Russian/American composer, who emigrated to the USA after the Soviet revolution in 1918. Born 1873 in Semyonovo, near Novgorod, 400 miles north-west Moscow, at his family’s estate, Rachmaninoff was from a noble family of Tatar descent. His mother started to teach him piano at the age of 4. Arkady Rahcmaninoff, the composer’s grandfather, learned piano with the Irish composer John Field.

Rachmaninoff frequently drew inspiration from nature and folklore in his compositions. His second book of Preludes Op. 32 (the first was Op. 23) was written in the summer of 1910 at his family ‘s idyllic country house in Ivanovka, a sleepy, rural area, surrounded by nature.

“Exploring Dreaming with Mixed Reality” (DreaMR) engages with the human experience of dreaming through art, music and consciousness science. Using cutting-edge Mixed Reality (MR), we approach dreaming like surrealist paintings: experiences that reside halfway between the visible and the invisible. MR technology is uniquely suited for this purpose, because it positions the audience not within a virtual world (like VR technology does) but in a liminal space that blends the real with the un-real, the conscious with the unconscious, the physical world with the world of dreams.