Violinist Tomás Cotik Presents 3D Musical Performance

The prototype digital performance can be accessed through a smartphone, allowing audiences to view the performance from varying positions 

Soloist, chamber musician, and recording artist, Tomás Cotik also serves as associate professor of violin at Portland State University.

Currently on his sabbatical, Cotik is now based in Madrid, Spain. As a recipient of a Fulbright research award, he has created Música AR 3D — a digital performance of him playing Spanish Romance, written by an anonymous 19th-century composer and arranged for solo violin.

The performance can be experienced through the screen capture of a phone from several locations across Portland, Oregon, allowing listeners to walk around and see the presentation from different angles and distances. 

This prototype aims to show the possibilities of connecting and sharing culture within a community despite physical distance. 

Música AR 3D follows a series of multidisciplinary projects created by Cotik, including Ombra Musici, where his silhouette was projected onto a building in real time as he played Bach; and The Fiddler on the Roof, which featured a light projection of his playing on top of a building. 

Cotik explains that his work “seek[s] to broaden access to and enjoyment of classical music in innovative ways and to celebrate diversity and collaboration through music while exploring the ever-changing fashions in art and its presentation formats.”

“These projects reimagine the public concert as a participatory, democratized, and shared experience with contemporary relevance through technologies that offer magical, improbable components, while keeping the music in the forefront,” Cotik told The Violin Channel. “In that sense, they function as ‘placemakers’ for audiences and inspire the community to share their diverse cultures and stories, reinventing public spaces and potentially energizing and reimagining the relationship between people and their physical environment.”

Having released 17 CD recordings for Naxos and Centaur Records, Cotik has accumulated awards such as the Dean’s Council Award for Research, the Kamelia Massih Outstanding Faculty Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Fulbright Scholar Award for Spain. Throughout this season, he will be completing projects in Barcelona and Zaragoza.