MUSIC IN THE METAVERSE

RICHARD ELEN*

Brideswell Associates, Somersham, Cambridge UK

Second Life is the most popular ‘metaverse’, or on-line virtual world, and also the longest-established,
founded by Linden Research Inc in 2003. It today has over 12 million “residents” – real-world people who
are represented “in-world” by a unique “avatar” – and in general up to 60,000 residents are in-world at any
one time. Enjoying live and recorded music is extremely popular in Second Life. The technology for
getting music – whether live performance, a DJ set or the equivalent of a radio programme – into Second
Life is related to that used in regular internet “radio” but with some significant differences and special
considerations. This paper provides a practical overview of the music production and distribution chain in
Second Life, and how to maximise audio quality and effectiveness in this virtual environment.

AN INTRODUCTION TO SECOND LIFE
Second Life (“SL” for short) is an Internet-based virtual
world or environment. It was developed by Linden
Research, Inc (commonly referred to as Linden Lab)
and launched publicly in 2003.
While not the only such virtual world, Second Life is
certainly the largest and most successful, and as well as
entertainment applications, the environment has found
favour among libraries and universities, many of whom
have an in-world presence and have found the
environment invaluable for teaching applications. The
“Library 2.0” movement, which seeks to develop the
provision of library services via information
technology, originated in the UK in the 1970s, is
particularly strongly represented in-world and “Info
Island”, the in-world base of several real-world library
systems, offers a wealth of services and programmes.
Second Life was inspired by the “cyberpunk” literary
genre, and in particular by Neal Stephenson’s 1991
novel Snow Crash. The intent of Linden Lab is to
create a world like the Metaverse described by
Stephenson, which is a user-defined world in which
people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise
communicate. It can be regarded as a quintessential
“Web 2.0” application (inappropriate though the term
may be) in that it brings together a number of internet-
based activity threads, such as social networking
(MySpace, FaceBook etc), Instant Messaging (Google
Talk, etc, and now audio, voice-based conversations),
the web, and online gaming (such as World of
Warcraft).
Indeed, Second Life is sometimes referred to as a
game, but this is a very poor description for something
that is a great deal more multidimensional as a result
of the requirement for residents to create their own
content. SL has no winners, losers or points; no levels;
no player attributes; and no strategy or other gaming
characteristics. You can, however, play games in
Second Life, from football to fencing or aerial combat.
Like the Web in the early 1990s, Second Life has been
suffering a similar series of examples of misreporting
in the press. Second Life has a fairly steep learning
curve, and the average journalist does not have the
luxury of spending several weeks in-world to learn the
ropes, and instead reports hearsay and misunderstood,
sensationalised snippets. Thus first it was the cool, ‘in’
thing that nobody understood; then all the big
corporations were investing in it; then all the big
corporations were allegedly pulling out, and so on.
Currently SL has gone through the “it’s all sex and
pornography” stage and is presumably now due for the
“Oh, well, we knew it was important all along” stage.
Doubtless in five years’ time we will look back on SL
and its imitators as being very crude and basic – just as
today we look back on the early versions of Lynx or
Mosaic – but nonetheless important precursors to
something culturally very significant.
There are currently 12+ million residents in SL, of
which about 60,000 may be in-world at any given time
and 1.5 million logged in over the past month or so.
The virtual world is accessed via a programme called
the Viewer, which enables subscribers (generally
referred to as “residents”) to gain access to the virtual
environment utilising primarily online/computer
gaming technology including high quality graphics and
directional audio.

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RICHARD ELEN
Once in the virtual world, residents are represented by
“avatars” (from the Sanskrit word meaning “earthly
representative of a god – a rather appropriate term)
which can be made to walk, run, fly and perform other
activities, some of which are built-in features of the
infrastructure and others which can be created by
writing mini-applications in a scripting language called
LSL. This makes possible such things as dancing and
other animations; flying and sailing vehicles and
fireworks displays, to name but a few.
Residents can also create objects and items, from body
shapes and clothing for their avatars to houses and
castles, using in-world and off-world 2-D and 3-D
graphics and modelling tools. Items created, and
services offered, by residents can be sold to other
residents for the local currency, “Linden Dollars”,
which can be converted into real-world US Dollars (the
exchange rate is currently about L$270 = US$1).
Because residents create their own content, unlike the
situation in most online games where the scenery is
stored locally, the content of the environment has to be
downloaded and the interactions with it computed in
real time. As result, SL requires quite a high
performance computer and graphics card, and a
respectable broadband connection.
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Residents can also rent virtual land, either from Linden
Labs (on what is commonly referred to as “The
Mainland”) or from private estate owners who rent
servers from Linden Labs on which the “simulator”
software runs and then sub-let space on them. Indeed,
regions in Second Life are still often referred to as
“sims” (short for “simulator), originally handled by a
single server, though today four or five regions can be
handled by one server.
While the mainland is more or less a microcosm of real
life, with shopping malls, apartments, beaches and the
rest, the private island estates are often themed. Azure
Estates, for example, a company based in Australia,
maintains a number of regions that are constructed as
residential tropical islands. Still others have historical
or fantasy themes – or a combination of the two. One
such – where the present writer’s own avatar ‘lives’ – is
the Independent State of Caledon, a “micronation” of
33 regions at the time of writing, whose theme is
“steampunk” Victorian, where everyone walks around
in period costumes, is very polite, and owns some
kind of virtual steam-powered Jules Verne-esque
vehicle.
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MUSIC IN SECOND LIFE
Second Life is a place where you can meet real people
(in the form of their avatars) from all over the world,
build friendships and even relationships, and co-create
your own entertainment. One of the most popular
forms of entertainment in-world is music, and a vast
number of “virtual clubs” exist to cater for this need,
where people can gather, meet, make friends, dance
(with suitable pose-ball animations) and enjoy both
live music and sessions presented by DJs. The number
of avatars that can be supported by a given server varies
depending on the power of the server (which is
generally related to how recently it was installed, newer
classes of server being more powerful), but it is
generally expected that a region will support at least 50
and possibly up to 100 avatars, though at extreme
limits the server may crash or require a restart, and the
amount of latency (known as “lag”) experienced by
participants, which makes movements sluggish and
avatars unresponsive to commands, may make the area
unusable. Even in these situations, however, it is
likely that the music stream, being more or less
independent of the Viewer, will remain listenable and
intact – and indeed, if the user has the stream address,
they can generally (but not always, as we shall see),
listen externally to Second Life with a conventional
music player such as iTunes, WinAmp, VLC and so
on.
The core of this paper is how this music is created and
distributed to residents of Second life, and we will
begin our examination with an overview of the chain,
starting from the in-world end and working back to the
production end. The complete chain is shown in
Fig. 1.
HEARING MUSIC IN SL
Individual “parcels” of land can be set to receive a
specific music URL and this is available to any
resident who is within the property lines of that land,
thanks to a player embedded in the Viewer which can
render stereo internet audio streams. The embedded
player is based on the FMOD libraries from Firelight
Technologies Pty – a common audio system in
computer and console gaming environments – and this
allows a great deal of flexibility.
The use of an embedded player which is essentially
separate from the rest of Second Life’s infrastructure
also means that the music playback system is
extremely robust compared to some other aspects of the
Second Life environments. Second Life’s server and
Viewer software are works in progress, and while new
versions of either can cause disruption as they are
implemented, the music system remains largely
unaffected. There are continually suggestions that
Linden Lab should provide enhanced audio facilities by
using their own player infrastructure; however this is
strongly resisted by most of those who actually known
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MUSIC IN THE METAVERSE
how music playback is currently achieved. Basically,
as it stands, the current system has its limitations but
it works: if Linden Labs were responsible for writing
and maintaining it, it would probably lose some of its
current stability. Linden Lab has recently been
promoting the use of the newly-introduced voice
system for relaying music, especially for live
performance; however, like other in-world object-based
audio (such as objects that make or play sounds – for
example a rock that provides birdsong and
environmental sounds, a sea buoy’s bell, or a modelled
piano, that plays built-in sound files) it appears to
originate from a source, is essentially monophonic, and
fades with distance; it also requires additional
hardware. The standard streaming “parcel music”
capability, on the other hand, is in full stereo, the same
wherever you are in the parcel, and capable of excellent
results. As a result the vast majority of musical
performances, live or pre-recorded, are rendered in-
world with the FMOD-based parcel music system. One
could say that music using the voice system is like a
solo musician playing totally acoustically; the parcel
music system, on the other hand, is like playing with a
full PA.
The music that is played on a land parcel is usually set
by the “owner” of the land, though in the case of and
island’s common estate land it may be set by the estate
manager. It can be set directly by right-clicking on the
bare land, selecting “About Land…” and choosing the
Media tab. This enables you to enter an audio URL (as
well as a video one for video playback screens and
other devices, using Apple’s QuickTime). In addition,
a wide range of “tuners” are available that allow the
user to choose from a number of preset URLs,
typically by clicking on the tuner object to bring up a
menu and making a selection and thus change the
stream address from an object.
The FMOD libraries support a vast selection of
computer audio file formats, but the ones that interest
us specifically here are mp3 (MPEG I Layer 3, the
extremely popular compressed audio format) and Ogg
(an increasingly popular open-source lossy-compressed
audio format) audio streams.
In general, if an avatar arrives on a parcel, whether by
teleporting, walking, riding or flying, and they have
their music player in Play mode, playing of the stream
currently selected for the parcel will begin immediately
after a suitable buffering period. Problems can
sometimes arise in the case of a change of stream
provision when the sample or data rate specifications
change, in which case the visitor may need to click
Pause and then Play to re-acquire the stream.
The owner of a land parcel can tune their media URL
to any available internet radio station using one of the
above methods. The owner of a virtual club, however,
in addition to being able to tune to existing general
internet radio sources, will generally utilise a special
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RICHARD ELEN
stream for musical and entertainment events, and the
club parcel(s) will be set to this address for the
duration of the event. This stream will originate from a
server owned or rented either by the venue or by the
artist, or the artist’s manager (yes, there is a complete
music industry infrastructure in Second Life).
STREAMING TO SECOND LIFE
The origin of these music streams will generally be a
Shoutcast or Icecast server, owned either privately or,
more usually, by a company specialising in the rental
of such services either to general customers or
specifically to Second Life residents. Some of the latter
have their own shops or stalls in Second Life where
visitors can rent streaming audio servers by the day,
week or month. Typically a server supporting up to
100 listeners, at data rates up to 128 kilobits/second,
will cost around L$4000 or around US$15 (£7.50) per
month.
Shoutcast is a proprietary freeware digital audio
streaming server technology developed by Nullsoft, the
developers of the popular WinAmp media player.
Shoutcast servers are available for several operating
system platforms and allow the streaming of audio
content in mp3 or (unusually) AAC formats using
HTTP or their own Multicast as a transport protocol.
In addition to audio, the stream is able to carry
metadata such as song title, artist, and station/server
identification. However while metadata is displayed by
a stand-alone player such as WinAmp, no built-in
provision is made in the Second Life Viewer to display
metadata, although scripts and scripted devices can be
found which will do this for you, either displaying
current data as floating text or in public chat.
Icecast was created by Jack Moffitt and Barath
Raghavan in the late 1990s, and is an open-source
streaming media project maintained by the Xiph.org
Foundation and made available under the General
Public Licence (GPL). Its intention is to provide
similar functionality to Shoutcast but with some
significant additions. Icecast is also the name of the
specific server application at the heart of the project.
The server can stream content in Vorbis (Ogg), AAC or
Theora formats via HTTP, plus mp3, AAC or NSV
using the Shoutcast protocol. Icecast servers can be
configured to offer compatibility with Shoutcast
streaming clients, and are available for Windows and
Unix-like platforms.
Both Shoutcast and Icecast use a client/server model in
which the client develops the audio stream and is
generally co-located with the origin of the audio
content. This stream is fed to the server, which is
normally co-located in an environment offering very
wide bandwidth, allowing the stream to be heard by a
large number of clients. (Although the server can be
run locally, there is very little point as the average
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originator only has limited upload bandwidth, which
would be used up by just a handful of listeners.)
TYPES OF MUSIC PRODUCTION
As far as creating the stream is concerned, there are
probably three main types of operation that we need to
look at. While the principles are the same in each case,
the practice will differ somewhat. The most
straightforward is playing an automated playlist – this
is basically identical to running a conventional stand-
alone Internet radio station. Probably the most
common, as far as Second Life is concerned, is a DJ
playing recordings live, either from files or traditional
discs, at special events in-world, such as a party, dance
or other occasion: this is the kind of activity that a so-
called “radio station” in Second Life most usually
offers. And the most interesting is probably the
streaming of live music.
There are some combinations, too. One of the most
interesting is when a real-life (“RL”) radio station or
radio show has an in-world presence and uses in-world
sources to add to normal RL content. An example here
is the NPR (US National Public Radio) show Science
Friday. The show goes out once a week, yes, on
Fridays, and has a special auditorium in a region called
SciLand, which it shares with organisations like
NASA. Every Friday, people from around the virtual
and real worlds gather in the auditorium to hear, and
participate in, the show, which is relayed live from the
Nashville NPR station WPLN (simply by setting the
parcel audio to the address of their stream). The show
has essentially a magazine format in which a number of
items, generally based around live studio interviews,
are presented and phone-in questions to the
interviewees are then taken. The show has a special in-
world compère who fields questions from the SL
audience and feeds them back to the show where they
are incorporated live. The technology now theoretically
exists for them to take live questions via voice and
feed those back to the station and put them on-air.
It is seldom that a Second Life-based audio production
organisation actually runs an internet radio station per
se. Most of the “radio stations” in SL operate for
special events and not all the time. An exception is
Radio Riel, founded about a year and a half ago by a
woman in the Detroit area whose avatar is named
Gabrielle Riel, and of which I am a member of staff.
The station has about 16 staff around the world, in
Australia, Israel, the UK, and across the United States.
This enables presenters to be able to cover all time
zones. The station has access to up to four streaming
servers, one for its main daily programming, one for
the majority of special events programming and two
others are available in the case of multiple events
occurring at the same time.
Radio Riel began originally providing DJs for live
events but last year expanded into providing a close to
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24/7 radio service with a quite specific core market –
the residents of Caledon – the intention being that
Caledon residents would be encouraged to have their
land parcels ‘tuned’ permanently to the station. As we
noted earlier, Caledon is a Victorian/steampunk-themed
area, and the residents particularly enjoy Celtic,
Mediæval & Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and
Victorian popular music. In practical terms, however,
the cutoff is around the end of the Big Band Era.
In the autumn of 2007, Radio Riel started producing
two types of programming, in conjunction with the
Caledon Library, which now has its parcels across
Caledon permanently set to Radio Riel. One was a tie
in with the Library’s Book of the Month Club. Every
month a new work is chosen by the library – always a
19th century work or earlier, in the public domain – and
at the end of the period a (generally well-attended)
public discussion is held in the Library Headquarters,
where the book, the author and the social context of the
work are discussed. There is an audiobook equivalent
of the Gutenberg Project, called Librivox.org, which
encourages volunteers to collaborate in recording
readings of public domain literature, chapter by
chapter. Radio Riel now broadcasts these audiobooks
in the days running up to the discussion, both as
individual chapters in conjunction with “listening
parties” at the Radio Riel HQ, and the complete works
from beginning to end.
The other collaboration with the Library is the
introduction of a series of daily broadcasts called
“From the Library…” in which Radio Riel presenters
build themed playlists of aspects of their music
collections, generally with a specific “Caledon-
friendly” theme, such as “Choral Music of the
Renaissance” or “Early Folk Music of North America”.
For each programme, the presenter writes a discussion
of the theme for the Radio Riel web site, which
provides a daily programme guide, and directs the
listener to artists, recordings and web sites of relevance
and interest.
Virtually all the above examples, although they are tie-
ins with events and organisations in-world, essentially
consist of the compilation and automated playing-out
of playlists, just like many internet radio stations. A
variety of playout applications are in use for this
activity, depending on the specific presenter involved
and the system they use for music. Typical is the use
of SAM Broadcaster by Spacial Audio – a typical
Windows-based internet broadcasting programme
which includes its own streaming client – another is
Fidelity Media’s MegaSeg, a Macintosh-based playlist
automation system.
Although the above activity is a significant one for
Radio Riel, it is almost unknown for “straight”
internet radio stations to be based in Second Life and
targeted at its residents: in most cases, residents
simply tune their parcels to an existing internet station
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MUSIC IN THE METAVERSE
they like. As noted earlier, Second Life’s “stations”
actually provide DJs and music for special events, such
as parties, dances and even formal balls. The quality of
these offerings varies from quite amateur to
exceedingly professional.
Radio Riel is very much involved in this activity and
frequently provides presenters and their music libraries
for special events, and also provides “hosts” who
welcome attendees and show them where the various
facilities (such as dance animation machines) are.
Exactly how Radio Riel’s presenters handle these
shows varies from one presenter to another and also
depends on the type of event. For a Formal Ball, for
example, the presenter will normally assemble a series
of a dozen or so 15-minute music segments. Attendees
have ‘dance cards’ with numbered slots and invite each
other in advance to schedule a dance. As each segment
nears its end the host will call the number of the next
dance and warn people that it’s coming up. Then
between segments, the presenter will announce the
changeover on-air.
More usually, the event is a less formal affair, with
visitors dancing to music whose theme has been
chosen by the client. Often a client will request a
particular presenter who specialises in their chosen type
of music. Some presenters may use a sophisticated DJ
application such as Native Instruments’ Traktor, and
DJ ‘live’ in exactly the same way as they might in a
real-life club, beat-matching and building mixes on the
fly based loosely on a playlist and the feel of the
audience; others may use SAM Broadcaster or even
something as simple as WinAmp to play a pre-prepared
playlist, announcing the tracks after every 1-3 numbers
as in a conventional radio show.
Much more sophisticated are the live musicians who
perform in Second Life. Usually they are solo artists,
though some are quite sophisticated groups, and often
they have real-life musical careers in addition to their
work in SL. In these cases the actual music production
process differs little from live music in any
environment. Typically the musician(s) will use mics
and pickups conventionally, and mix live to stereo.
The stereo line-level feed goes to the line input of the
computer’s sound card and thus to the streaming client.
FROM SOURCE TO STREAM
Some broadcasting applications have their own
streaming client built-in. Other streaming clients are
stand-alone and pick up the audio from the music
playing application by “hijacking” it on its way to the
sound card.
My own preferred approach is a hybrid (see Fig 2,
over). I use a Apple Mac Mini as a music server, with
two 1TB external FireWire drives for the music library
(one as backup). For automated playlists I use Slim
Devices’ Slimserver, the latter playing out via a
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Squeezebox 3 network player. For ‘live’ shows I use
Traktor, but due to a bug in its streaming of lossless
FLAC files (the format of most of my library) and the
fact that it only streams an Ogg stream to an Icecast
server, I do not use its built-in streaming client.
Instead I use an external analogue mixer. The
Squeezebox drives one stereo channel, while Traktor
uses the outputs of an M-Audio Firewire 410 audio
interface and from there into the mixer. The mixer
output feeds the 410’s inputs via a stereo
compressor/limiter and thence back into the Mac Mini,
where the streaming client NiceCast picks up the audio
from the Macintosh’s Core Audio system and uses it
to drive the stream.
DRIVING THE SERVER
At Radio Riel, we use Icecast servers, but they are
configured to emulate Shoutcast ones. This is because
not all the staff members who access the streaming
servers have the ability to address an Icecast server
directly. For example, the simpler streaming
applications such as the DSP plugin for WinAmp or
the SimpleCast application from Spacial, can only
handle Shoutcast servers. This, and other
considerations, leads to some interesting configuration
issues. In addition Radio Riel has access to four
streaming servers at different data centres based in the
US and Europe so as to minimise the chances of
multiple streams being taken out of action by one
event.
In the case of Radio Riel, one of several people will be
driving one of the two main streams at any given time.
This means that whatever the settings are, they must
provide the same result for the listener. In addition, it
is necessary for any handovers between presenters to be
as seamless as possible. We do not want to lose
listeners because their player has dropped out during a
handover or because the stream address has changed.
To minimise listener loss of stream during a handover,
all presenters use the same stream specifications: mp3,
44.1 kHz sampling, 16-bit, 96 kilobits/second. In
addition, care is taken to minimise the time the stream
is off the air during a handover. The originator-server-
listener path has significant latency (in the order of tens
of seconds), so in-world private instant messaging is
used to count down to the handover. When the input to
the server is cut, the output is also cut, so the idea is
to hand over seamlessly with the next presenter picking
up the stream immediately it is released by the current
presenter. If this is the case and the stream
specifications are identical, then the listener in-world
will generally not experience a break in transmission. If
a break occurs, the remedy is or event hosts to ask
people in public chat to press Pause and then Play on
their embedded media player.
An Icecast server has what is known as a “mount
point” which is included in the complete URL
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supplied to listeners. This is usually something like
“live” or “stream”, but it can be set to anything. Thus
the URL will be something like
“http://minor.slserver.com:9004/live”. However, when
the server is accessed as a Shoutcast server, the mount
point is predetermined. It’s important to take care that
the mount point provided by default and that used in
the streaming client are the same, so that the URL will
be the same whether a presenter is driving the server as
Shoutcast or Icecast.
Another consideration is the transport format used to
stream to the server. The server normally outputs the
stream type and specification it is fed with; so if you
feed it mp3, 44.1kHz sampling, 16-bit, 96 kb/s, that is
what listeners will get. If you send an Ogg stream to
an Icecast server, you will get an Ogg stream out
(normally: it is possible to transcode the format in the
server but this is seldom available on rented servers
and may also impact audio quality). The FMOD player
embedded in the Viewer can play Ogg streams (and
they give better quality for the same data rate than
mp3) but most off-world players cannot handle them.
The listener attempting to hear the stream in WinAmp,
say, or iTunes, will see the embedded stream metadata
but will not hear anything.
Normally, this is a disadvantage, as the station wishes
to maximise its audience both in-world and off-world,
and as a result Radio Riel streams mp3 exclusively –
despite the fact that the format is rather long in the
tooth and somewhat inferior to more recent streaming
technologies such as AAC Plus – as virtually any
streaming audio player will replay it successfully. This
is not unlike the situation with DAB in the UK: it is
old-fashioned, but everyone can listen to it. One area
where streaming Ogg would be useful would be if you
wished to carry adult content to Second Life listeners.
By definition, all residents of Second Life must be 18
years of age or over. Thus a format that the Viewer
embedded player can play, but virtually nothing else
can, might have its uses.
MAXIMISING QUALITY
Achieving reasonable audio quality in Second Life is a
real challenge. To begin with, we are streaming a lossy
format (and a relatively elderly one, at that) and we are
streaming into an environment where a great deal is
going on. Many objects make sound in Second Life,
from environmental ambient sound generators to
clocks, running water, footsteps, and even the sound
effect of typing when people are typing in open chat!
This means that it helps to keep the average level up.
In addition, especially in the case of live music, the
content may be fairly dynamic. As a result a degree of
automatic dynamic range control is required, ie
compression, to bring up the average apparent
loudness. In addition, as the effect of overloading the
stream is quite nasty, with sudden onset of loud
MUSIC EVERYWHERE – AES 23r d UK CONFERENCE 2008

distortion at clipping, having a peak limiter in the
chain is a good idea.
Some streaming clients have the ability to incorporate
plugins to modify the audio (NiceCast, for example,
can use Apple Units and other audio plugins and
includes some useful ones such as a multiband
compressor) and most broadcast applications have
built-in complimiters of some kind. If there is an
analogue part of the chain (as I have in my own setup,
or live musicians will have) then there is the added
challenge of overloading the inputs of the audio
interface, and in this case a conventional stand-alone
complimiter (with the limiter set just below clipping
on the interface in puts) is worth having.
Another issue is the fact that the data rate is relatively
low. Higher rates would be perfectly practical for a
plain vanilla internet radio station but it must be borne
in mind that the listener is downloading streaming
audio in an environment which already has
considerable bandwidth requirements due to the
content-rich virtual visual environment, all of which is
defined remotely and must therefore be downloaded.
Some audio in SL is streamed at 128 kb/s but this is
fairly unusual as it can bog down some users, and as a
result Radio Riel has adopted 96 kb/s as our standard
data rate, it appearing to be the best compromise
between audio quality and client loading.
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Equalisation can be used to compensate for loss of HF
content due to the data rate, and this can generally be
configured by the presenter, or with the assistance of
friends or colleagues, in tests, as can the amount of
compression and overall level-setting.
IN PERFORMANCE
Performing in Second Life, as either a musician or as a
DJ, is a fairly complex activity. In addition to doing
what you normally do on the audio side, you are also
present in-world as an avatar. In any live music
situation there is a visual aspect to the performance,
even if you are ‘just’ playing records, and in SL it is
made more complicated by the fact that the audience
can’t see you, they can see your avatar. Bearing this in
mind, when I wrote a booklet for an artist-manager
friend of mine to give to her musicians on how to get
the best sound when performing, I included at the end
a section on ‘Performance Tips’, some of which might
give you a bit of an insight into what playing music in
Second Life is about, above and beyond the technical
considerations. Call it “suspension of disbelief” or call
it “maximising immersion” – it’s important. Like film
or television, what you are doing has an illusion at its
heart.
• DON’T try and use the same computer to stream
your music and keep an eye on what’s happening
at the venue in SL. The SL Viewer application is
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RICHARD ELEN
very power-hungry and you will be very lucky if
your streaming survives you running the Viewer
on the same machine at the same time. Do the
music on one machine and keep tabs on SL on
another. Probably, surprisingly enough, the more
powerful of the two machines should run the SL
Viewer.
• DO make sure that the venue or your agent gives
you all the stream details beforehand so you can
set up your system. You need to know: Type of
server; server IP address; the port number; the
password; and, in the case of an Icecast server, the
‘mount point’.
• DO monitor the output of your audio system
while you’re playing, preferably on headphones.
You should have a listen to the audio from the
music computer, but you probably won’t be able
to play while you’re listening, due to latency – the
time it takes for audio to go through the system,
resulting in a delay. And if you try listening from
within Second Life or to the URL of the streaming
server, the latency may be enormous – up to tens
of seconds. So you will probably listen to the
mixer stereo bus outputs, which will not have any
latency at all… but do make sure you check the
stream occasionally if you can, if only to make
sure it’s really there.
• DO keep your Open Chat History window on-
screen so you can see what the audience is saying,
plus any IM window you need to see if your agent
or someone else is sending you comments about
the sound or whatever.
• DO maintain a dialogue between you and the
audience between numbers if possible… either
with simple inter-song patter or by responding
vocally to comments in open chat (DON’T type
while you’re supposed to be performing!).
• DO try and animate your avatar a bit – or get
someone else to help you – and try generally to
help the audience maintain a suspension of
disbelief. Between songs, detach the guitar, get off
the poseball that makes you wiggle your hands
around, or whatever. Don’t let your avi (avatar)
just stand or sit there appearing to be playing
when you aren’t or vice-versa, or have it lifeless
(and especially not displaying an “Away” tag).
When we do most things in SL, we are willingly
suspending disbelief and you want to encourage,
rather than obstruct, that.
• Corporation in California, co-wrote an AES paper on
USEFUL WEB ADDRESSES
Second Life web site: http://secondlife.com/
Second Life Music Community Forums: http://slmc.myfastforum.org/
SL Music Development mailing list
(largely supplanted by the Forums, but not entirely):
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/musicdevelopment/
Radio Riel web site: http://radioriel.org/
Caledon Wiki: http://www.caledonwiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
16-8
The worst case of all, when you are rich and
famous, is of course to show a live video of your
RL performance on a screen behind the stage while
your avi pretends to do something at the same
time – do one or the other, never both.
CONCLUSIONS
In my experience, the majority of people over half my
age don’t understand this Second Life thing or why I
would “waste my time” in a “game”. Presumably they
would rather I was sitting in front of the TV absorbing
everything thrown at me rather than going out and co-
creating my own electronic entertainment.
Exceptions to that are often educators, many of whom
have seen the potential of an immersive 3-D
environment as a teaching tool. It is my belief that
virtual environments will be as important in the future
as the Web is today, with all the pros and cons, and
that Second Life is one of the places – the most
successful and perhaps most advanced – where that
technology is being developed and, more important,
used by tens of thousands of people a day. Music has
an important place and an important role to play in that
environment, and I am pleased to be involved with a
group of people who are helping to take musical
entertainment into a new arena.
Hopefully this paper has helped to give you an insight
into music production and distribution in the Second
Life ‘metaverse’ and how those of us who are working
in this new aspect of the entertainment industry ply our
trade.
*Richard Elen is a writer, broadcaster, recording
engineer and producer, and former Editor of Studio
Sound magazine. He is the head of Creative Services
at Meridian Audio Ltd in Huntingdon, UK; however,
as the work described in this paper is not directly
related to his work at Meridian, he appears here
under the banner of Brideswell Associates, his own
consultancy company, and Radio Riel, the Second Life-
based internet radio station and events promoter
described in the body of this paper.
Richard has been a Second Life “resident’ for over a
year, and has specialised in improving the quality of
live music and audio in virtual environments. He was
the chair of the first conference held in the UK on
computers and music, in the early 1980s, and in the
late 1990s, while VP Marketing at Apogee Electronics
maximising the quality of streaming internet audio.
MUSIC EVERYWHERE – AES 23r d UK CONFERENCE 2008