The context of designing Walden in Second Life, or any virtual world, plays off Henry David Thoreau's retreat into the woods, observing and listening to nature - and how it intersects with modernity. Walden in SL is inside a mega skybox textured with real photos from Concord, MA. To create depth, snow texture has been added, as well as trees, etc. to the inside of the box. Sounds are created in two ways; scripted boxes with sounds that can touched. Importing audio in SL can be challenging, for they cannot be any longer than 10 seconds.
However, in-world sounds can be linked together. An easier way to bring in sound is to stream a composition as you would any music. Land parcels can be subdivided and various streams can be used for exhibition. In this case, however, the Walden skybox will share one stream with 2 other skybox exhibits. I am building upward for less lag and to minimize the cost of land. Only one skybox at at time can be exhibited within a sound stream. At this point, Walden has general ambient soundscape. But there are certain sites within the skybox that can be touched to hear particular sounds: walking, water, and so forth. The soundscape will be completed at the end of spring; however, I must turn priority to the creation of a South American rainforest build with a complete soundscape that must be done for exhibition at the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology in Mexico City in late March. More on that to come in this blog, as it progresses. Another build - my 3rd skybox - will be the Sound of The American Frontier. I am presenting a paper on what that era sounded like also at WFAE.
Related work:
Static: Iron Beast (2007) (sound piece and paper)
http://static.londonconsortium.com/issue06/index.phpSoundscape: Mediated Music (2004, p. 30 -33)
http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/WFAE/journal/scape_9.pdfReconstruction: Women of the New Walden
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/072/johnson.shtml
Second Life provides a wonderful exhibition space, and the set up is much easier than RL. The biggest problem is positioning the skyboxes into air, especially at an elevation of nearly 4000.
