Songs for a Burning World: youth-led storytelling through VR and 360° opera

Songs for a Burning World is a youth-led, co-created immersive opera realised through 360° film, VR, and dome exhibition. Developed through extended online workshops with young participants across twenty countries, the project mobilises operatic voice and sound-led XR practices to articulate climate experience as lived, situated, and plural. Youth and community members are positioned as authors and co-researchers, shaping narrative, sonic material, pacing, and modes of address, rather than contributing testimony to pre-existing frames. Their songs, spoken texts, field recordings, and visual material form both the content and the method of the work, foregrounding embodied knowledge about the climate crisis from, and through decentralised authorship. The article argues that the convergence of XR and operatic storytelling offers a distinctive framework for climate communication. By prioritising voice, duration, and affect over explanation or didactic clarity, the project redistributes narrative authority away from expert discourse and towards collective listening. Operatic storytelling, understood as a system in which music carries time, psychology, and causality, enables multi-perspectival narratives that can hold contradiction, uncertainty, and uneven climate impacts without forcing resolution. XR extends this affordance by situating audiences within shared sensory environments, producing co-presence rather than empathetic substitution. Drawing on the Songs for a Burning World case study, the article develops a model of sound-led, immersive co-creation grounded in dialogic editing, devolved leadership, and transparent technical stewardship. It challenges extractive and spectacle-driven approaches to XR by adopting accessible formats and trauma-informed, participatory methods. The project functions both as a distributed archive of youth-led climate narratives and as a prototype for sustainable immersive practice. It proposes that the value of immersive climate storytelling lies less in technological intensity than in the conditions it creates for shared attention, collective authorship, and ethical circulation of voice across linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries.