This is what music between two virtual worlds looks like: on the left, acclaimed Second Life-based musician Grace McDunnough performing for an audience in SL's Isle of Wyrms (including several appreciative dragons), while also performing as a Metaplace avatar named "Grace McDunnough" in the Folk n Coffee Cafe of the web-based user-created world. The cross-world concert began with a request from Metaplace founder Raph Koster; to hear the performance, he explains on his blog, Metaplace users just had to set their audio to the Shoutcast URL where it was streaming. Looks like a great way for SL musicians to expand their reach and audience. Ms. McDunnough has an excellent post on her blog, explaining the rest. "I realized how important it was that I was Grace McDunnough in both places," she notes, so she could maintain a unified performance identity. While there's a lot of conversation about virtual world interoperability of content and currency, this is probably the most poignant application I've seen so far: worlds literally linked by song.
Image credits: Left, from sngrfx's Flickr stream; right, Metaplace's TwitPic feed.
One of the obstacles to live music in Second Life has been the limitations on the size of the audience. Delightfully, Grace has demonstrated an innovative way around that obstacle. Bravo! Encore!
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Monday, March 23, 2009 at 02:27 PM
This kind of thing is essential to making virtual performance a powerful tool and revenue stream for artists. Now the only problem is keeping up. ;)
Posted by: Matthew Perreault | Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 09:52 AM