Whislt it would always be great to develop the ability of virtual environments to use of sound and music, Second Life offers such huge potential as it is. Indeed, Adam Ramona often tells me how he enjoys working within the creative contraints of the Second Life medium and how it spurs him to be more creative.

A number of interesting exhibits have opened across the grid recently so I thought I’d quickly document my experiences of them. Firstly metamusic member Da5id Zsigmond has created his “Loop Machine” installation. Da5id is working this up to be a collaborative interactive jamming exhibit. I popped over there recently and tried it out. Whilst still in development – it was definitly interesting. The machine controls numerous loops which are all synced and volume controllable – which are also synced to a series of changing images across a deck infront of the “players”.

There are many people experimenting in the field of synced looped devices, including Octal Kahn and Robbie Dingo. Recently Billy Trenton ( who makes a lot of nice replica studio gear in Second Life) demo’d a prototype after the last metamusic event.

Above is another interesting project that opened this week is Daruma Picnic’s “Force Sun to Midnight”. This is a sound art installation over at Infotainment Sim. Its interactive visually as well as audibly and allows avatars to control sound playback in objects by walking through them with collision scripts. The object size scripts were developed from Keystone Bouchards open source reflexive architecture scripts and Daruma aslo had some guidance from Adam Ramona, an artist who has been experimenting in this field for some time.

I caught up with Daruma over at the installation and did a quick interview :

Dizzy Banjo: why did you create it ? and what inspired you ?

Daruma Picnic :I am interested in interactive work and this is my second experiment using sound. I was inspired musically by Ravi Shankar Peace Mantra. Listen carefully and you can hear a whale and sea lion.

Dizzy Banjo: How do you find working with sound in second life ? was it frustrating for you working with the preloading issues etc ? did you find the 10s limit a limitation or a creative framework ?

Daruma Picnic: Yes well i have lots of lag because i work on an old machine- so i am not sure how other people experience it. Most of the sound is composed off line of course using garage band and further edited in audacity. That is the most time consuming aspect of working with sound and music.

Dizzy Banjo : Did you work with a scripter on the properties of how the objects expand / contract / change colour etc ? or did you do the whole thing yourself ?

Daruma Picnic: the change color and the sound script i wrote myself with the guidance of Adam Ramona. The prim movement scripts are free to copy from Keystone Bouchard via his reflexive architecture. He encouraged me to experiment with his scripts and loves this piece.

Dizzy Banjo : Are you going to work on another sound based installtion ? Whats next for you ?

Daruma Picnic : Yes i have several in the works another singing sculpture, and a spoken word sculpture

Keystone Bouchard has himself also been creating a very interesting musical installation in Second Life. However this time, the emphasis is more compositional. ‘Wikisonic’ is an experiment in collaborative composition, in many ways similar to the architectural equivalent currently underway in Second Life – “Wikitecture”. This is a really interesting project and I’m going to investigate it much further with an interview with Keystone ( coming soon! ) .

Fundamentally it allows people to key in note values into a “stave” which is played in a rotating manner – kind of like the virtual equivalent of the brass cylinder in a music box. The composition can be continually altered and changed by multiple users simultaneously.

All these projects ( and the multitude of others out there ) show how the medium of user generated content within Second Life is in itself incredible expansive creatively and allows for many possibilities. This is especially true with the collaborative possibilities they enable. It’s exciting to think of the ways people will use the social medium of Second Life in the future as more tools come into play.