I’ve been to some great shows over the years.

The Charles Mingus Big Band and Al di Meola at Ronnie Scott’s. Chic, The Stones (no surprises there) three times, the great Colombian supergroup Ondatropica, Jupiter & Okwess International after they were run out of their native Mali by Islamists.

The incomparable Arijit Singh. Frank Ocean at Brixton Academy, Watch the Throne.

I’ve watched John Eliot Gardiner conduct Mozart, heard Vivaldi performed in La Serenissima and felt myself be rapturously reduced by Bach’s Mass in B Minor, as performed by a boys’ choir no less, as it took on a particularly revenant splendour in the surrounds of London’s Brompton Oratory.

Granted I turned down the chance to see Prince play his secret show at the Electric Ballroom in 2014 because I presumed that my friend who had gotten the intel had been misinformed. But other than that, if live music forms part of your cultural survival kit in any meaningful way, the above is the stuff of a pretty nice life.

The other night I went to see Coldplay on the third night of their Wembley residency. They are an exceptionally deft musical force, considerably more inventive and substantive than they are given credit for. They are almost as much disliked as they are popular, because they are able to make weighty emotions sound frivolous and consumable. This is no easy feat, is rarely appraised for its difficulty or considered seriously for its worth (which I think to be considerable), and while it is possible to take moral exception to it, most of the sniffy disdain the band accrue has nothing to do with this particular gift, but is merely sentimental or prejudicial. On the night of the show the band’s musicianship was clean, if shorn of wild excursioning, and the setlist imperiously hit-studded in such a way as made sequencing an afterthought (though they should have held ‘Adventure of a Lifetime’ for the encore).

But the spectacle itself went beyond anything any pop artist has ever staged, including the group’s forebears U2, from whom Coldplay inherited both their global superband mantle and their reputation for trying to push the limits of stadium rock staging. What Coldplay have built towards, refined and accomplished on their recent tours doesn’t just dwarf the grandeur of U2’s greatest live program — the oddly misconceived ‘Claw’ setup on their 2009 U2–360 tour — but adds new dimensions to it altogether.

There were many remarkable aspects to the overall composite — from kinetic floors to help the crowd’s dancing renewably power the stadium to a singing puppet to a ‘C-stage’ that sat squarely at the back of the venue — but the key to the experience is wearable technology.

As it has for the last ten years, Coldplay’s show revolves around the ‘xylobands’ you can see everyone in the crowd wearing in the video above. Much imitated by other artists since their debut in 2012, these wrist-mounted LEDs turn the light show, once a remote and more-or-less purely technical concern, into a participation game. Sometimes they flash in awesome alternation. Other times they swell in single colour to mark a song’s emotional flashpoint. The effect is immersive and infectious, extending to every member of the audience the feeling that they have a deeper stake in the performance than that of a mere punter.

And indeed, the level of participation even in the further reaches of the stadium, among a crowd of huge diversity in age (as in other parameters), was unprecedented throughout the length of the 150 minute show with minimal drop-off. The intimacy, cultivated by the artists and their music and magnified by their technology, was stuff the likes of which few stadium shows ever see.

For all of the public’s merited concerns about the negative effects of mediating technologies in many real life contexts, this was one instance in which the reach of mediating technologies was used to humanise what can otherwise be an alienating spectacle. It suggests ways in which well-deployed technology can enhance the intensity of the communion sought by lucky ticket-holders when they attend an event like this together, especially when harnessed to the proper art.

And this probably represents just the beginning of the technological augmentation of live music. My conviction is that the next new ground for the concert experience will be broken using smart glasses.

Seriously.

Smart Glasses?

When smart glasses arrived on the market, they were like a Midwestern Queen of Sheba arriving in New York on a Greyhound bus in all possible finery but without a single dollar in her pocket. Yes, the pomp and circumstance were impressive, but there was no clear sign what they were going to do next, or quite what they were here for.

But smart glasses’ lack of utility wasn’t their most egregious sin. No, smart glasses also violated the single most sacrosanct principle of wearable technology. Unlike Fitbits, which both communicate something substantive (if essentially uninteresting) about the wearer and look good enough to wear even when depleted of battery, smart glasses were, and remain, basically unsexy.

But check this out. This is a demonstration of an AR-enabled smart city environment, activated through smart glasses technology, piloted in China.

Imagine all the elements you can see here — multi-dimensional augmented-realistic scenery, complex holographic assets, the creation of an entire ‘unreal’ ecosystem inside a real space — transplanted to a concert environment.

Forget mounted screens, now you get the performers’ faces beamed right up close to you. In fact, you can set your own viewing perspective from your seat, allowing you to take in the sweep of the communal experience one second then fixate on a guitarist’s conjuring fingers the next.

Forget mounted spots, now you’re getting extraordinary holographic light shows directly in your lenses, and boundless possibilities in the visual communication and augmentation of musical material. A concert environment so assuredly — to use a quaint and ancient term — ‘multimedia’ as to feel almost synaesthetic.

And the best thing about this smart glasses-driven hypothesis? It would spell the end of the ghastly modern convention of experiencing a concert directly through a mobile phone held aloft. The reason that phone-oriented concert experiences suck is not because of the act of mediation itself, but because the blue light emitted by the devices is visually disturbing, because it incentivises the phone owner to watch the phone instead of the performance, and because it strands the phone owner in an awkward physical posture that is anathema to the kind of dance, movement and feelings of undifferentiated physical togetherness that form one of the deepest pleasures of the concert experience.

But by making a pair of smart specs the mediation device, the mediation itself becomes a communal experience that the artist can control and optimise for, instead of an atomised one that they can’t. With smart specs, everyone is taking part in the same shared unreality. And there’s no reason at all to hold a phone aloft because the phone can’t capture what’s going on behind the glasses, which are probably recording the whole show for your later relived pleasured anyway.

None of this is exactly feasible in present circumstances, not even given the financial might of the biggest band in the world. First off, you’ll need smart-glasses that can, like the xylobands, be produced for trivial cost.

And then, just as crucially, you’ll need digital infrastructure considerably more powerful and more energy efficient than anything currently available. Where we currently live on 4G, an experience of this kind would need networks capable of 6G.

Getting to 6G

Most mobile internet connections currently active around the world are 4G. That means you’re sending and receiving information at a rate of around 100mbps.

At the beginning of 2022, Nanjing-based startup Purple Mountain Labs successfully trialled a 6G connection for the first time. 6G runs at speeds of 200gbps, a 20x improvement over the current norm. Former chairman of China Mobile, Wang Jianzhou, had already speculated even prior to the Purple Mountain Labs trial that China will have the benefit of 6G by the end of the 20s.

While other feats of technology might have more star power and exoticism than mere wifi, there’s reason to expect that the leap to 6G may prove one of the most transformative technological achievements of the first half of the 21st century. It’s not just that the speed of wireless connection will skyrocket, but that signal latency will sink to unprecedented low levels, while energy efficiency-per-instance-of-communication rises sharply.

Given such power, all of the kinds of visual enhancements of daily life that you saw in the video above will be made possible. There’s no doubt that we value life far too haphazardly nowadays for these possibilities to be used completely properly. It is likely if not probable that the ability to deck cities in magnificent holographic lightforms will mainly be used to conquer a user’s attention space with ever more invasive advertising, and perhaps even to addictively gamify that handful of things in our lives (like walking around a city) that have remained resistant to dopamine-spiking since the rise of Web 2.0

But it’s also beyond doubt that 6G, harnessed to hardware like a decent pair of smart glasses, will offer the means to stage incredible creative experiences of an immersive value that Music of the Spheres tour stops have only hinted at. It is likely as not that Coldplay themselves, being positively visionary in their use of concert technology and also perhaps the last band of huge import that matters to a wide variety of people, could be the ones to harness those gains.

Tech, Beautiful Tech

When Chris Martin and co. played “Fix You” near the end of their set — a song whose sentiment, somewhat cloying on record, is quickened into something overwhelmingly cathartic and, indeed, defiant of taste in the group context of a concert—the stadium was evanescent with the amber light of those xylobands. “Lights will guide you home,” went the chorus, and as those lights shimmered on 80,000 wrists one could hardly help but feel that it was not the words themselves but the enormity of the sentiment behind them that had suddenly been illustrated for the benefit of sight, just as the music reliably illustrated the sentiment in question for the benefit of sound.

It was a moment — and they are distressingly few and far between nowadays — in which one received, in a way that defied conscious apprehension and merely demonstrated itself in self-evidence, an insight into the way in which technology can make our lives, and our communal and private emotional experience of our lives, greater, richer, and deeper, instead of smaller and duller.

Who says you can’t learn anything from a little (soft) rock n roll?

With thanks to Ashley Dudarenok