Liberation Through Hearing

“Liberation Through Hearing” is an interactive opera based structured like a platform game. It is an audio-visual, large-scale work that combines a dramatic story, taking place in digital media, with game-like elements.

Like in many video games, in this saga, the user paves the way of a morphing protagonist during its journey as it encounters diverse imaginary creations. Unlike most video games, in this opera, there is no scoring, no winners or losers; one can only wander in two-dimensional space while creating the music, and the only goal is to move forward.

The opera’s libretto is rooted in the “Bardo Thodol”, also known as “The Tibetan Book Of The Dead”. The book is a foundational text of Tibetan Buddhism. It describes and guides one through the Bardo, a realm where the deceased’s consciousness journeys during the interval between death and the next rebirth. Vivid visualizations of after-death experiences that may culminate into hellish ordeals constitute the dramatic element from which the opera emerged.

Hand drawings constitute the main fabric of the visual aspect of the opera. In nearly all traditional 2D video games, each level or section is constructed of repetitive patterns, both musically and visually. In Liberation Through Hearing, there are no repetitions: every part is hand-drawn, and every second is composed through. Most of the visual work is a vast painting to be crossed and interacted with while creating the music, where each level exhibits a theme following the libretto.

The game addresses themes of death and draws on the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), and may therefore be unsuitable for young children.