Opera, NFTs and VR (Live Classical Opera Performance) - Lauren Michelle

so we'll keep it going on time thank you [Music] me [Music] technical difficulties do you like this you guys yeah please that's it we'll probably need are you taking pictures of my technical difficulties technical difficulties at a tech conference [Music] display because it's in a video [Music] oh [Music] me [Music] gloriously [Music] [Laughter] me [Applause] [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] peace [Music] me [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] so [Music] that means isn't there another phrase [Music] i think i remember it oh [Music] yes [Music] is [Music] for me [Music] still [Applause] [Music] thank you so much denver denver let's go yes i'm a djinn also i sing opera and i'm a djinn um this is the link tree to all of the things that i'm going to talk about right now um so excited in real life in irl i am an opera singer i'm an international opera singer my name is lauren michelle and actually we are very privileged to have in the house the pianist that you heard playing is actually sitting right there lachlan glenn please wave to everyone yes lachlan we recorded that in a studio in new york city several months ago um so i've been singing internationally for a very long time i went to juilliard i've sung in all kind of italy france germany spain austria wales i've sung in so many different countries but no one really seems to care much about all that stuff except when they hear that i sung on empire if you watched empire i was the opera singer that cookie was so excited to be listening to and even though i'm an opera singer and i've been singing all over the world and i am actually an american i actually don't sing a lot in america and unfortunately it's you know it's a little weird in america sometimes people don't like what you look like and they judge you and they decide not to hire you yay america so when i found out about blockchain and all of its wonderful marvels to me it it was like i don't know like like like a breath of fresh air i felt like all of a sudden i had wings there were potential wings there and i started to explore to see what i could do to try to use blockchain to basically free myself and do whatever i want to do which is to sing and and be in tech so i decided to do a genesis project and i decided to merge everything that i love which is opera nfts and vr and i pre i i created uh genesis by lauren michelle and there's actually a couple holders in here i see y'all i see y'all i see y'all um and so i wanted to talk a little bit about how i did that project and mostly it's really to um one of the things that i love so much about blockchain is that it has a lot infinite possibilities and especially with vr and so the idea really is to look at how us as artists we can be really creative and we can create anything and i mean anything if i'm up here as an opera singer in 2022 okay he's thinking that freaking denver okay then anything can happen and that's i guess the point right so what did i do i i started a first track which is um a bunch of my thoughts a bunch of phrases songs and i created this uh i don't know if you can hear it the sound is you know it's a little a little funky in here but but you can hear these whisperings and this is actually the first track that i created so it's just like literally entering my head is what this track is let's go is what i just said right there right okay so then i decided okay now i'm going to take that and i'm going to snip it up into little bits and i added it to an image it's a moving image but it's an image and i created that as my nft so that's actually my first um technology being oh there it is it's moving it's moving for you that's the moving part um so i created my first uh tier which is orchestra level it's a music nft and there's seven tickets uh with that nft there's seven tickets to my performances in vr and it also comes with an unlockable which is a vr headset and i figured if you're getting your vr headset for the first time with my nft you probably need some onboarding so there's some red carpet onboarding you know a little vip you know a little sweet there and so then i decided to do another tier which actually is arias like what you heard just now when i sang that's one of the pieces that we also put in the mezzanine level and the mezzanine level has again it's the pieces you it's snipped into little parts so you have the only part of that aria is what you have when you own this piece and so with the mezzanine level um it includes three tickets to vr performances and it's a music nft and so i created these three tiers because i thought okay orchestra level is great but that's really that's like you know it's it costs a bit it's at 0.5 um and then and then the second level is the mezzanine and it's 0.2 and the balcony i thought you know i'm sure there's people that just want to go maybe to one performance it's not a music nft it's just like entry if you want to get in and you just want to like hang with us that's cool and that one's at point zero five zero sorry point zero seven five so uh okay we're all moving okay so the point of all of these nfts is to go to this performances right in vr and what i've been doing is i've been building out virtual experiences on different platforms i've been buying up different property and i'm building out an experience like this this was an alt space um we built this underwater theater for performance and i performed i don't know if you saw the the avatar but that was my avatar and i was performing live um yeah and that's my dressing room down there it's really really great anytime you guys want to come visit i will take you on a tour it's really really fun or i'll meet you there in the performance so the idea is that throughout 2022 there's going to be different experiences built out for that specific performance and you'll get a chance to explore the metaverse with other metaverse goers and it's like uh being at the opera house right so in the opera house you would be sitting in a seat and maybe you have like a subscription and you come back every saturday at two o'clock for your matinee where you start to see the same people around you and so people end up having the same subscription they want to keep their seat because they want to be the next to the same people and that's kind of the idea of operaverse operaverse is this space that i'm creating in web3 to live out my best life as an opera singer in 2022 and beyond and to share these wonderful music that i that i have been blessed to be able to learn since i was 13 years old so um okay the mac power is low cool so as we've built out different experiences we're going to have of course pre pre-talk so that you know about you know the performance that you're not just lost like what is she singing about you would have been probably hanging out in this room right here we would have been talking about what the translation was all of like the wonderful things about what opera is and so that you feel really comfortable going in to the space and then hearing the music um we also are going to be doing parties and uh don't even underestimate an opera ball in your future all i'm saying that's all i'm saying okay um yeah so right now it is on operaverse.io and we i actually have pause minting um one of the things that i did i just said hey if we're gonna do an nft we might as well do it from scratch so i was like i want to do it from my own website so i built a website and then i was like oh i need to do a solidity contract so i had never coded in my life and it's been quite interesting putting together the metadata and i'm like literally losing my mind but it is so worth it because i really believe in the project and um so right now we actually have paws minting there are people which i haven't told you guys yet but the people that have already purchased the nft i am so grateful to you guys like literally i'm so grateful and i'm actually gonna give you like a special surprise so i actually paused minting i'm going to give you something really nice and yeah it's dope and we're going to be resuming minting on 2 22 22. we'll also be having a party so even if you're not going to be minting please do join operaverse and just come to the party it's just gonna be fun so if you're curious about vr this is probably the time to do it we have a discord where you can view it in the discord so you don't have to actually have headsets yet yes that's basically my my project the whole point of having this project for me is really to inspire and why did i decide to come up on stage and do this um it's really to more inspire artists to take back their power um throughout time musicians have been really just percentage to death we're always getting everything taken from us and this is really i think blockchain is a way where we can actually get that back especially if we're minting our own stuff and not doing them on different platforms i also want to be the change that i want to see in web 3.

if you look around the diversity is not that great even though this is actually a a conference that really has gone out of their way to really try to include people and so one of the things that people always say is that we're so early and we actually are so early and that means something so if we are so early the change that you make right now is actually going to make such a difference it's going to go so far it's going to go so much further than it normally would so i just want to encourage you to really be the change that you want to see in web 3. um show up bring people if your um dev team doesn't look colorful change that you got time okay you can do it i believe in you yeah um so yeah guess what i got a pull out for you guys yeah um i have a poet for just you guys and everybody that's streaming go ahead and i'm going to use my last minute that i have to let you guys get your po app um and i want to thank you guys so much i really appreciate you listening and i hope that again even if it's not the nft if you're just curious about opera you're curious about how all this is even going to go together please do join us the next qr code will have um the link to our our um our discord i'm in clubhouse all the time twitter spaces running rooms so please do uh join i hope everybody has their po app and let's go [Applause]