First Person Singer

The First Person Singer (FPS) project aims to experimentally create prerequisites for a new operatic format offering the audience first-person perspectives from individual characters through personalised streaming. By equipping opera singers with body cameras and microphones, the project allows audience members to experience the plot through the eyes and voices of individual performers. This approach enables multiple musico-dramatic experiences and performances can be revisited sequentially from different point of views to provide new empathic insights and emotional depth over time. 

Key to the project is the development of a prototype, set to be tested in 2025, which will explore the technical and creative challenges of integrating first-person perspectives into opera. Furthermore, questions about how technology can expand and support the role of the opera singer in a digital context are in focus. Unlike many interactive operas that minimise singers’ achievements or replace them with avatars, the concept ensures the singer remains an active, multimodal agent at the centre of the performance. 

The project also sparks philosophical and societal discussions, aiming to challenge traditional opera norms and audience expectations. Connecting to broader societal shifts, fostering access to art and inviting reflection through multiple perspectives, it aims to engage new audiences, promote viewpoint diversity, and encourage critical reflection on the complexities and ethical issues of the human digital experience. 

Participants in the Project 

Hedvig Jalhed is director of the research infrastructure Inter Arts Center at Lund University. She is a professional opera maker and her research focuses on conceptual exploration and multi-sensory composition for human live performance in the field of music drama. Drawing on concepts and ideas from game design, ludology and creative technologies, her practice-led research primarily concerns questions about immersion and interaction in contemporary chamber opera, but also operatic innovation and evolution at large. At the Academy of Music and Opera, Mälardalen University, she is senior lecturer in chamber music and chamber opera as well as director of artistic research. In 2010, she founded the independent opera company Operation Opera. She has been the artistic director of Halland Opera & Vocal Festival since 2013, when she was appointed by Region Halland.

Sara Wilén is a classically trained singer and a senior lecturer at the Malmö Academy of Music, where she is course leader for the degree project within the performance programmes, faculty coordinator of digital teaching, teacher of improvisation and stage performance, supervisor and examiner. Wilén is also engaged as a PhD supervisor and examiner in music by European HME institutions. Her career as a soloist includes performances at NorrlandsOperan, Teatr Weimar, Skånska Operan, Riksteatern and Operaverkstan/Malmö Opera, as well as numerous productions with the group Operaimprovisatörerna. In her research, she studies processes of co-creation in opera improvisation. 

Alexandra Huang-Kokina is an academic, pianist, and creative director whose work bridges music, literature, intermediality and digital humanities through critical and creative practices. Her forthcoming book, The Musical Performativity of Twentieth-Century Piano Novels (Palgrave Macmillan), examines non-traditional piano performances as a vehicle for socio-political transgression. She leads practice-led projects, including Creative Digital Dynamics and OperAI, which explore the role of AI in multimedia music performances, and AI Kaidan: Yūrei of the AI Empire, an immersive science-fiction opera blending Japanese folklore and Kabuki theatre within a Western operatic framework. Alexandra is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Lund University’s Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity. She also co-directs OPERACTIVE, a business initiative focused on music entrepreneurialism and integrating technology into classical music innovation.

Ingar Brinck’s research is interdisciplinary in cognitive science and psychology from an embodied, dynamic and distributed perspective. She has more than 80 peer-reviewed international publications in the evolution and development of cognition and communication, perception and motorcognition, 4E aesthetics, cooperation, intersubjectivity, situated ethics, and the philosophy of language. Brinck is currently working on two topics: making and improvisation in arts and crafts, and social robots and human-machine interaction. She leads the CogComLab, is a core member of Lund University’s profile area Natural and Artificial Cognition, and a member of the management team of WASP-HS (a national research programme on AI in the humanities and social sciences) at the Wallenberg Foundation. She has collaborated with researchers from many European countries and for several years was affiliated with the Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris.