About the Opera

Last updated: June 27, 2026

The Royal Star Opera of New York is an opera house without walls. Our mission is simple and very large: to reimagine the world’s great stories as original, full-length operas, and to give them away free to anyone, anywhere. We are just getting started, opening one new production at a time.

For most of history, opera has been the most ambitious of art forms — and one of the least accessible. A single production can take years and a fortune to mount, and most of the world will never see the inside of an opera house. We set out to change the arithmetic.

A library of world story

Our repertoire is deliberately global. It reaches from the foundational epics — Homer’s Odyssey, the Ramayana, Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh — through the great novels of Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy, Zola, and Mann, to the folk legends of the Basque country, Japan, West Africa, the Andes, and dozens of other traditions. Every era and every continent has a place on our stage.

How a Royal Star opera is made

Each production is generated by an original computational pipeline that we built from the ground up. Crucially, there are no image or video generators anywhere in our process — nothing is “AI-painted.” Instead:

• The libretto is adapted from the source story into full acts, arias, recitative, and chorus, developed with the aid of AI language models and shaped by classic dramatic structure.
• The staging is drawn frame by frame as 2-D vector art by a bespoke rendering engine — sets, costumes from fifteen world cultures, choreography, weather, lighting, and a cast that includes both human singers and mythic creatures.
• The score is composed and performed by an algorithmic orchestra, scene by scene, while the singing voices are synthesized and tuned to carry each melody.

The result is a complete film — a real opera, with an overture, acts, and a finale — typically around an hour long.

Honest about the art form

We are proud of what this pipeline can do, and candid about what it cannot. Our voices are synthesized, not the voices of living singers; our staging is stylised vector animation, not the painted grandeur of a great opera house. We think of Royal Star as a new folk tradition for a connected age — a way to keep the world’s stories sung and alive, at a scale no traditional company could attempt.

Behind the curtain

The Royal Star Opera is an independent, solo project — written, engineered, and produced by Ibnul Jaif Farabi.

Ibnul is an engineer, writer, and builder based in New York City. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he studied electrical & electronics engineering at the Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology (RUET) and earned a master’s in electrical and computer engineering at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His career spans Amazon, Tata Consultancy Services, and NYC Health + Hospitals.

Every part of a Royal Star production — the rendering engine that draws each frame, the system that composes and performs the score, the pipeline that gives the singers their voices — was designed and built by one person. It is, quite literally, an opera house of one: an attempt to do, with code and patience and a love of storytelling, what once took a company of hundreds.

Rights & sources

The stories we adapt are drawn from the public domain or from traditional material, and each is reviewed for rights before production. Every Royal Star production — its libretto, score, animation, and recording — is an original work, © The Royal Star Opera of New York. See our Terms of Service for details.

Get in touch

For press, licensing, accessibility, or anything else, write to support@royalstaropera.com or visit our contact page.