Upcoming Bringing the Blues to Life Through VR

This article describes a virtual reality (VR) CAVE project designed and created to contextualize the reading of blues poetry within the history and sound of the blues in the United States. The project aimed to provide students with a better understanding of the blues as a musical form so that the nuances of the blues poems of Langston Hughes would be more readily understood, thereby improving comprehension of form and elevating classroom discussion for a humanities seminar. Students navigate the space within a virtual blues joint to access biographical and geographical information about blues musicians and regional sound, as well as to listen to songs and poems and to watch “live” performance. The article includes details of Langston Hughes’ poetic project and the selected poems, the navigable features of the VR project, and student journal responses to the experience, showing the value added to comprehension by accessing the music in a holistic approach.