Just had an interesting email from Melissa Linden which is being sent out to lots of musicians in Second Life. It seems Linden Lab are doing a survey gathering the views and hopes of musicians using their virtual world.  The survey contains some interesting questions, including comparisons to the benefits of Second Life over Myspace and vice versa, many suggestions for possible in world media and performance improvements and numerous boxes to suggest further ideas.

Could this signal a fresh initiative to develop Second Life as a platform for music, to compete more directly with established musicians networks like MySpace, TheSixtyOne, Garageband and many others. Could it also signal a more direct approach to creating a platform which would help foster a virtual music industry ? ( possibly taking cue’s from non creation based music worlds such as vSide ).

Here’s a few of things that came out in my answers ( I can’t remember it all now as you can’t go back to see the form once submitted ).

• Increased audience sizes - either through architectural changes to increase agent limits per sim or by some kind of sim mirroring
• More streaming integration - possible use of a modified higher quality stereo voice client to create more intimacy and less time distance between streamer and listener
• Integration / Investigation of MIDI in SL
• Improved integration with tools like Ninjam
• Improved calendar / events notification systems - direct integration with third party calendars ( google / eventful etc )
• Increased audio upload beyond 10s limit
• Monitoring / notification of successful sound preload on client
• Improved clientside simultaneous playback of sounds

If you are a musician, DJ or venue owner ( or in any other way involved in the music scene in Second Life ) and would like to take part in the survey it is here

Together with Lillie Yifu, I created a big bottle for the Second Life 5th birthday celebrations. We asked the entire SL community to contribute messages both as audio and text notecards. The response was really astounding. It was a really amazing experience to hear everyone’s messages and how much SL has touched peoples lives.

I’d like to thank not only the huge number of residents who submitted such great messages, but also a number of people which have really helped promote the project and communicate it to a wider group of residents, these include : Torley Linden, Hamlet Au, SLNN, Al Kronos, Malburns Writer, VInt Falken, Gwyneth Llewelyn and Stephen Venkman. I’d also like to thankBukTom Bloch, Andromega Volare, Trinity Clift and Vint Falken for helping translate the instructions.

The bottle is still open and we are still taking messages. Infact we may try to leave the bottle open permanently - or perhaps we will throw it into the Second Life ocean and see if it washes up at a later SL birthday !

I made a quick and easy video tutorial to explain how to submit a message here :

Here is a SLURL link to visit the bottle for yourself ! :

http://slurl.com/secondlife/SL5B%20Copy/11/139/23

Lots more pics here on my flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/dizzybanjo/sets/72157605958165178/

Visit Remedy Exploration here : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Remedy%20Exploration/101/153/311/

I decided to start to resurrect the Metamusic group with a series of video podcasts about interesting virtual uses of sound and music. I’m hoping to try to document lots of the more interesting builds around Second Life and somehow create a resource of short video’s explaining them, where possible featuring interviews with the creators. As hosting installations in Second Life has a reasonably high associated cost in land tier - it seemed like a good idea to try to document them whilst they are still there. For the first one, I randomly chose Bid Messmer’s “Remedy Exploration” build.

If you have created an installation that uses uploaded or streamed audio in an interesting / interactive way and would like to be part of the series, it would be great if you could give me an email here : dizzy@dizzybanjo.com

I’m going to be on a panel on the opening day of Second Life’s 5th birthday celebrations on June 23. The panel also features Nexeus Fatale, Keiko Takamura, Hep Shepherd, Cylindrian Rutabega, Slim Warrior and Benton Wunderlich. We are going to be discussing the various ways Second Life has assisted or been the driving force behind our musical careers. I’m really looking forward to it, it should be a good discussion!#

The exact time and venue of the panel is yet to be decided but I expect it will be on the official SL Blog soon. I’ll also do an announcement in my in world group “Dizzy Banjo ‘ed”

UPDATE :

SignpostMarv Martin has just informed me of a great new way events in Second Life can be tied into Eventful.com. The above event now has its own event page here : http://eventful.com/events/sl-musicians-building-rl-careers-/E0-001-013347447-6

As Signpost explained to me, this has wide implications for Second Life performers as they could use eventful as a powerful tool to inform the community of upcoming gigs etc.

I was very happy to be invited on to Music Academy’s onLive TV show the other day. The show was hosted by the brilliant Benton Wunderlich, who is doing some awesome work in Second Life promoting music in many forms, running workshops and lectures about masterworks and many other exciting intiatives. As usual, the show was filmed and broadcast live by the consistently slick SLCN team, who always amaze me with their ability to fluidly capture live events in SL.

Music Academy, is not only a great resource in Second Life. Their website is a brilliant resource for composers and musicians, especially from the fields of classical / concert music and soundtracks / media music, but also relevant to other interests. Their use of the virtual medium is quite outstanding. Most importantly the work Benton does in making classical music more accessible is brilliant. I guess this is logical really as part of an ongoing trend of educational establishments finding SL to be a superb platform, but its the first area where I’ve seen this type of music being so explicitly promoted.

We had a great chat during the show and it was nice to have an hour to talk through influences and the various projects I’ve been doing in Second Life. The show is archived on the SLCN website and should be available for viewing for some time to come. You can view it here.

]]> http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/music-academy-onlive-show-on-slcn-tv/feed/ dizzybanjo http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/orange-music-academy-and-a-little-in-world-group/ http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/orange-music-academy-and-a-little-in-world-group/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 23:49:20 +0000 dizzybanjo http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/?p=155

I have to apologise for how few posts have been made recently on this blog. Things are kind of getting on top of me. But I thought it would be good to try to update it with a few things that have happened recently and are going to happen soon.

I was very happy to be invited to give a talk on writing music for machinima recently at Orange Island, the presence of the european telecommunications company in Second Life. I also did a small interview on their blog. It was part of a series of events dedicated to the art of machinima in Second Life, something I’ve gradually become more involved with.

The machinima “Passage to Zhong Fu” directed by Verdi Millionsofus, with acting and design by Poid Mahovlich and Duckyfresh Watanabe, for which I wrote music for last year, has now had over 63,000 views on youtube. This has been quite staggering really and unexpected. Saying that we really enjoyed that project and I’m glad a wide audience has been able to see it.

I’m also going to be doing an interview soon on the Music Academy Online show on SLCN. I went to a brilliant discussion the other day hosted be Benton Wunderlich, from Music Academy, about Mahler’s 4th. It was a really great use of the SL platform to dissect and discuss works of this complexity and brilliance as a group. They are doing some really interesting stuff on their Island, I hope to get involved with them more in the future.

I also thought it might be worth mentioning that I’ve set up a simple SL group to keep up to date with various projects I’m involved in. If you go to Search and the groups tab, and search for “Dizzy Banjo” you will find it - its called “Dizzy Banjo ‘ed” and its free to join.

]]> http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/orange-music-academy-and-a-little-in-world-group/feed/ dizzybanjo http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/visit-mexico-ruta-maya/ http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/visit-mexico-ruta-maya/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:15:40 +0000 dizzybanjo http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/?p=151

I was very excited on Thursday evening. The second stage of Mexico’s official presence in Second Life was opened to the public. I was lucky enough to be commissioned to write the score for the project by Advanced Virtual Inc. a company developing the official presence of the Mexican Tourist Board in Second Life.

Ruta Maya is a 2 sim extension of Mexico’s presence in Second Life. It adds a new trail of Mayan sites to the existing very successful Chichen Itza exhibit. The project features a huge rainforest ( by Kriss Lehmann of Straylight fame ), a number of scaled reproductions of Mayan temples and ruins, a beach, the city of Campeche, a fort and a pirate ship. There are loads of things to do around the build as you explore, including hang gliding, rope slides up in the rainforest canopy, a waterfall you can walk behind, lots of animals to interact with, horse riding along the beach and much more.

You can visit the Ruta Maya sims here : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Visit%20Mexico%202/201/95/30

My role in the project was two fold. Firstly I created a very detailed environmental soundscape and secondly an orchestral score featuring authentic cultural instrumentation.

Here are some of the ’sleeve notes’ from the sound track :

In 2007 I provided a soundtrack to a promotional machinima of the Visit Mexico Chichen Itza project, to assist it’s successful bid to become a new wonder of the world. It was such a wonderful experience working with the team on the project that when the chance came to expand the already very successful Mexico presence in Second Life, I was very excited. The commissioning of a large scale custom soundtrack for the project was a tantalizing opportunity.

During the project process we had many discussions about the nature of the soundtrack, covering a wide range of issues, including how it should convey Mayan culture while remaining contemporary and emotional, and how it should be pitched in terms of emotional involvement and underscore. I would visit the sims under construction regularly and as the build grew up around me it became clear that this would be a stirring emotional place. To reflect this some parts of the soundtrack are quite rich and sensual, with rousing melodies and uplifiting drive, while other parts are more relaxed and contemplative. There are also some parts of the score which provide a more primal rhythmic pulse to underscore exploration.

Instrumentally the soundtrack features a wide range of authentic Mayan instrumentation, from many clay and wood flutes and ocarina, through water drums, a wide range of wood percussion and chonch shell horns. It also features full orchestra, with a large contingent of mallet instruments, including marimba and both metal and bamboo vibraphones.

It was a great honour to be commissioned to write music for this the official presence of the country of Mexico in Second Life and I sincerely hope you enjoy it.