A Second Life for Sound: Crossing Sonic Paths in Virtual Worlds
Abstract
Over the past few decades, developments in the field of sound have opened up many new types of musical experience that pose significant challenges to traditional understanding of sound, music and musical activities. Virtual sound spaces provide new technological possibilities and freedom to interact with sound and music in spaces and aspects that may seem unreasonable, unpractical or even impossible in the physical world. The article explores new technological and acoustic possibilities of Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world with elements of a social network. The project of this virtual networking platform, which had about 1 million active users on the Web at the time of writing this article, was developed and launched in 2003 by Linden Lab (San Francisco, USA), founded by Philip Rosdale. Second Life serves as a social network where users can communicate with each other, create their own surrounding and multi-user 3D virtual worlds.
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