After a rough start due to some new client issues, we finally got rolling at the Alphaville Herald launch party in metaplace. Metaplace needs a few more things to assist live musicians, but it’s still in beta so it will evolve. The metaplace crew were rolling out updates to fix client bugs a couple of times during the gig, and it eventually settled down. Mucho Fun had by all!
Thanks to Hathead and Noma for the Interwebz jam , Pixleen and the alphacrew, and the Metaplace team.
After the metaplace gig I hopped over to videoranch , Mike Nesmith’s live music virtual world, for the launch of the memorial day musicrise festival. It used Activeworlds as the platform, and their live video streaming is very nicely integrated into the environment.
Sounded great to me. I love the scaling of the RL video to avatar size, another subtle cue that adds some more immersion to mixed reality gigs like this.
Catch the hottest live blues trio in the Metaverse for a real time musical collaboration across the internet from three countries in full 2.5D isometric glory!
Komuso Tokugawa on vocals, harmonica and guitar live from Tokyo
Hathead Rickenbacker on piano live from Toronto
Noma Falta live from Atlanta on Bass/Vocals
I’d never been to a barcamp, so it was interesting to see the self organising presentation system at work.
After lunch I decided to do a little presentation on “The Future of Music”. Check the video out for my take on where I see some of this going, as a result of my prototyping of the Future of Music in Virtual Worlds such as SecondLife and Metaplace.
Temple University Japan have been doing a study on the SL music scene, where a number of people inlcuding myself have been prototyping the future of music in virtual spaces.
The students have looked at various aspects of the music scene and have done some nice posters up illustrating their findings.
I streamed a short SL concert into the Real Life gallery space in Design Festa, Harajuku, Tokyo last night with Noma Falta joining me on Bass.vox from Atlanta via Ninjam. It was a borderline event in technical terms;-) but I think everyone had fun and it illustrated some ideas of what we are doing on the bleeding edge of performing inside virtual spaces to the real world.
I’ll add a link to the Temple University website of the exhibition when it is up.
I’ve been working on other projects the last year so this blog was put on the backburner, but I’m about to start blogging a couple of times a week on the new paradigm music business and the future of the music industry.
Masterpiece - a “beta” multi-world 3d printing service from an Akihabara firm involved in gamedev. When the cost comes down and quality goes up these real models of avatars etc will become excellent merchandising items for online musicians to add to their marketing toolset.
Eitarosoft’s mobile 3d virtual worlds. They have an interesting solution to scaling the system to allow up to 400 people to access a virtual town at one time. I’d tell you how but then I’d have to kill you…
Vizimo’s lightweight funky world that supports up to 8 people at a time. Current version allows users to design physics enabled games/activitities from pre-built components [next version to allow import of user created content], with integrated sns.
Daletto World has an interesting look, with flat 3d characters.
SL ® was well represented, and opensim/realXtend also had some demos from 3rd party providers.
After attending the virtual worlds party in the early evening I visited the Tokyo 2.0 SNS party next door, the Japan SNS and Linux worlds events being held concurrently in the same hall as the virtual worlds event. Fortunately the beer and food at the web 2.0 party proved to be a little more real than the virtual worlds one!
A gaggle of VW people then met back at Bar Tube in Shibuya, where Philip Rosedale signed the Toilet Door, a tradition at Kanda-san’s bar when visited by internutz celebrities.
Another loose bar tube jam session eventuated with a number of people swapping off on different instruments - Hayashi-san from Impress on drums/bass, Kanda-san [owner of BarTube and well know IT/Video journalist] on bass, japanese j-rock guitar legend Hatake-san on bass/guitar, Komuso on harp/bass [badly I might add!], various jpop singers, Jets Fride on guitar/Bass and even Philip Rosedale attacking the flying V - though we had some trouble tuning that beast and it took Hatake-san to finally tame it into submission! Rock and Roll!
Following on from my recent ninjams with Hathead Rickenbacker and Moshang Zhao I recently collaborated with Von Johin on a ticketed event, also using ninjam, to celebrate the opening of his new sim - the French Quarter.
We sold out in just over a day after going on sale. To keep the sim performance reasonable for the audience (and ourselves!) we limited it to ~55 tickets. It was still laggy, but considering the tech issues we had with rehearsals the final event went very smooth, with only one disconnection and some other minor glitches. The internet gods were with us that evening, and the paying audience were more than satisfied with the three hour show we put on. Setlist was Von Johin solo, Komuso solo (with 1924 martin acoustic, 1934 National Steel, and electric), then Komuso on Harp with Von Johin followed by Von on Bass with Komuso’s electric set.
I recorded it all as well, maybe we’ll release a cut or two soon!
While the death throes of the recording industry become more frantic the music industry itself is quite vibrant, and in the new paradigm only two things ultimately count: the artist and the fans.
As such, it pays to take a pause and consider the nature of this relationship and music culture a little more deeply.
A very useful resource on this topic is Nancy Baym’s pdf of a talk she gave recently on online fan music communities. Grab it here.
This NYT article also touches on some interesting points related to getting in closer contact with your fan base and the issues in managing it.
I’ll be writing more on this key topic as I digest Nancy’s doc a little more.
I’ve been testing a very cool little xplatform open source streaming application.
Basically I have a very high workload with some of the gigs I do, esp more recently doing collaborative ninjams while running visuals as well. So I want a very simple 1 click app to control streaming and recording.
I only need my streaming app to do a couple of things - stream and record.
A bonus is to tell me the stats in realtime so I can track how many logged in and monitor for breaks in the stream, but I now use NetMeter to do the latter and I can have a firefox window open logged into my shoutcast admin to tell me the current logins - and I can also download the stats later anyway.
A small learning curve, and then you can finally dump SAM, Nicecast, Simplecast, and that clunky winamp/shoutcast dsp plugin. Version 1.8 just released with updates to the recording function. Does both shoutcast and icecast, and records your stream at different [ie: higher] bitrate than the outgoing stream - perfect for live recordings.
There are two ways of recording the stream automatically - start recording when you press the record button or to start recording only when you start streaming. I prefer to start recording manually as I like to check the stream is connecting to sl etc. The other way is a little tricker, could possibly use a “record armed” signal just to let you know status visually, but read the help and play with it.
Pros/Cons?
+ simple
+ fairly lightweight
+ flexible enough on streaming and recording formats
+ responsive developer
+ opensource xplatform
- record “on stream connection” setup a little non-intuitive (giving developer feedback now) - manual record aok though.
- no stats graph - can do without but would nice to have a la simplecast
Apart from that is does exactly what I need for this function in my live performance workflow. Other people may need more;-)
Project info site is here , help page is here, and direct download of latest version is here
The developer is very responsive, and feedback helps to keep them interested so let them know if you use it!
