Why Second Life Has So Little Ambient Soundscapes

This is an interesting /SecondLife thread on the comparably small market for user-created audio samples, which includes this great analysis from "gothicmuse":

Soundscape is one of the most neglected aspects of environment design in SL. Partly due to platform and scripting limitations and partly because anecdotally many people seem to mute them or to play music and so miss them that way. The main barriers are the falloff distance being very sharp for some sounds - people can't hear them unless they are up close or the volume is set very loud, a persistent bug that prevents sounds from reliable playing for all listeners and the difficulty of making longer loops with enough variation not to sound odd or annoying. Sound becomes a secondary aspect to the design, much like lighting, when your expertise lies elsewhere and you are pretty sure many of your audience will not experience it at all or will experience it badly.

This sounding on sound sounds right. (See what I did there?) Overwhelmingly, the soundscape of Second Life is streaming music and voice chat, neither of which contribute much to immersion (and in fact, tends to mar it).

I've often described the feeling of being in Second Life as underwater lucid dreaming, which is great from a certain sense -- but the underwater part is because there's hardly anything in the world worth hearing.

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Comments

[Ezra]

Can't do much with 10 second sound limitations all those other valid reasons aside.

[Gothicmuse]

You can do a lot more than people realise although it is complex and takes a lot of planning. I have tutored builds that were able to assemble entire sound sequences, including spoken word, quite effectively! It does mean it takes a level of effort that when balanced against how many people will experience it becomes hard to justify. Those examples were built as design set pieces where the builder made a deliberate choice to try and incorporate sound. When attempted the effect can be very powerful in part because the rest of the virtual world is so often silent.

[cyberserenity]

Sound is super important. What would a game or film be without it. Maybe Sansar fixes the problem.

[Canary Beck]

Come visit me at Basilique and you'll find much of the ambience to be rich with sound, from the sounds of people milling about in the cafe, to dogs barking in the alleyways, to birds squawking near the piers and docks, to the sounds of water crashing against the docks, and nature sounds in the park and pond. It makes a massive difference, and many visitors comment on how realistic it all feels, sometimes mentioning the sound specifically.

[Adeon Writer]

Audio is one of the biggest ways to draw people into a world and make it feel real, but it's always neglected in SL - I blame the really bad early attempts, as well as very little audio content purchasable, and very awful freebies that got distrubted very early on.

Second Life also doesn't allow you to adjust how much an individual sound tapers with distance or easily define the area in which it can be heard, which is mandatory for a good soundscape - otherwise you'll just be hearing everything at once.

If you don't play with SL muted, you've surely heard their awful excuse for "fountain water" that is high pitched white noise, or the 10 second loop of bird chirping played ad nausem.

There was no reason it had to be bad, it was just bad.

[Trep Cosmo]

SecondLife has a severe lack of audio because LL is shit at their jobs. SL is dead as a creative space. It's nothing but a virtual marketplace selling the same ripped goods over and over again.

There are bugs from 2009 and earlier in the sound system that are unresolved and even laughed at in chat logs by the Lindens.

The wiki is a joke, Jira is a joke, SL is a joke, and LL is the biggest joke of all.

And yes, I'm old as dirt in this space. I know the ins and outs of SL. But SL is a lost cause. It cannot be fixed. The reason they say SL won't be ignored for Sansar is because they've already been ignoring the truly creative users for over a decade.

And yes, I'm writing this as I'm fighting the busted system, a birthday gift I'm attempting to code will not live up to the vision because the sound system can't even do what is advertised. SL doesn't have sound because of "voice". It doesn't have sound because sound has not made LL money like pixel clothing.