The Avatar Orchestra will be performing at the Deep Listening Institute Women and Identity Festival Concert :: April 17, 2008; 7:30 PM :: Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), New York, New York.

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a group of composers, performers, and media artists living in Europe, East Asia and North America who explore together the interactive possibilities of the Second Life online virtual reality platform to create works with open, interactive and possibly “infinite” elements. The Orchestra works with ideas that challenge conventional practices of creating and performing music, and finds new ways to conceive of and erase notions of identity, place, social, cultural and sexual identity, and the roles of composer, performer and listener. Continue reading

Continue reading

A Rose Heard at Dusk is an interactive audiovisual sculpture for Second Life by Adam Nash. Access the sculpture in the gallery below the Opera House, on Big Pond’s Ponderosa Island. You will need the free Second Life software.

Using many of the possibilities unique to the Second Life medium, A Rose Heard At Dusk is a participatory artwork that turns visitors into performers. It was designed specifically for the cavern space under the Opera House on Big Pond Island. The work is designed to be “played” by visitors avatars. Walking, flying and jumping through the space, avatars create a unique audiovisual composition, different every time. Colours and sounds combine to create a spatially immersive musical and visual experience. Continue reading

Addressing the Network: Performative Strategies for Playing APART (2007), F. Schroeder Publications and Pedro Rebelo Publications. This paper has been accepted by the International Computer Music Conference 2007. An in progress version is available here [PDF]. “Addressing the Network…” describes a recent network music performance study that was carried out at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland in March 2007. A wide variety of network scenarios were tested and a large database of movie and sound files were created.

For the study three professional musicians were placed in separate studios at the Sonic Arts Research Center and asked to perform under a variety of conditions that simulated geographically displaced network performance, such as different latencies. One scenario in which computer generated graphics (Avatars) was introduced to test the performers interactions is described in detail. Network Performance Scenarios can be reviewed at here. Continue reading

NIME: Disparate Bodies :: June 7, 6.30 pm (NY); 3.30 pm (Stanford, by private invitation); and 11.30 pm (Belfast - Sonic Arts Research Center, Belfast - all welcome) :: Frederick Loewe Theater, NYU, 35 W. 4th St, New York, NY ::

Disparate Bodies is a network performance that explores multi-modal remote presence. The performance happens simultaneously in three sites (Belfast, NY and Stanford, California). The stage performance in NY features a laptop musicians and two Remote.bots. These are robotic entities that host the physical and musical gestures which are performed by the remote participants in the various locations. Continue reading

Jay Hardesty, Drazen Bosnjak and Harris Skibell are developing tone23, a musical ecosystem where music is the primary agent defining interactions between users. Music evolves in this environment based on the musical preferences and encounters of users. Implemented at hive23 in Second Life, it creates original music variations and hybrids based on association among avatars.

Music Rooms: The hive23 environment contains three rooms. Each room is associated with a separate musical stream that is determined by the avatars currently within that room. Each avatar is “tagged” with music they have chosen from a list of musical pieces, available outside the entrance to the three rooms. When an avatar enters or leaves a room, a new sequence of musical variations is produced for that room. These variations combine and rework parts from the songs identified with those avatars then inhabiting that room. Continue reading

Minimalist video document of a live avatar performance of Maximilliam Nakamura’s composition ‘Fadheit’ performed by the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse in Second Life, 27th March 2007.

Second Life, one of the most populated MMORPG, is an important watching point to verify how the borderline between real and virtual tends to become more and more ephemeral. In the last months Second Life has seen many famous names and brands of the real world coming into its virtual spaces. The Reuters news agency has opened a virtual editorial office, IBM decided to test here its v-business (virtual business) idea. Many other events as lectures, talks (Lawrence Lessig), concerts (Suzanne Vega) has packed the SL dwellers agenda. So an interactive audio installation couldn’t be missed. A certain Robbie Dingo (this is the name of the homonymous British sound designer avatar) programmed his WhisperBox (a 21st Century Folk Song). Continue reading

Talent-Spotting in Virtual Worlds

“…At Radio 1 we want to bring a new level of social interaction to our virtual broadcasts. We are hoping that the bands featured on-air will have their own custom-built avatars, playing in the virtual world. So if we have the Red Hot Chilli Peppers playing a gig, visitors to a Radio 1 virtual space will see avatars of Anthony Kiedis and Flea, mimicking the action in the real world.

We also believe it is crucial that the virtual audience can interact with the event. It is about replicating the “liveness” of an event, not just broadcasting it. Additionally, Radio 1 wants to find ways of allowing the audience in these worlds to actually affect the real event. I see no reason why they cannot be asking their musical heroes questions, alongside virtual Radio 1 DJs, either via Instant Messenger or VoIP. This deeper social interaction, that mirrors real world events, would do much to enhance the ripples that resonate around digital communities.” From Talent-spotting in virtual worlds by Daniel Heaf, BBC.com.