Architecting the Musical Metaverse: Lessons from 5G and Emerging Technologies

The Musical Metaverse envisions immersive, interactive environments where geographically distributed users co-create and experience music in real-time. These scenarios impose demanding constraints on communication and computation infrastructures, requiring ultra-low latency, deterministic audio delivery, and synchronized multimodal feedback. This paper presents a critical investigation into the capabilities and limitations of 5G and emerging technologies in enabling such scenarios. Building upon empirical evaluations and architectural studies, it identifies key bottlenecks in public and non-standalone 5G deployments and explores the role of private standalone infrastructures enhanced with Mobile Edge Computing. Furthermore, it assesses the potential of complementary paradigms - such as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces, mmWave communications, AI-driven orchestration, and Digital Twins - for supporting scalable and expressive musical applications rooted in shared creative expression, embodied interaction, and remote co-presence. The analysis shows that current technologies, while promising, remain insufficient to fully meet the stringent requirements of real-time musical interaction. It identifies key technological gaps and outlines future directions toward intelligent, adaptive, and musically coherent infrastructures that can support the experiential and collaborative nature of the Musical Metaverse.