Cyberworld Exhibitions of Sound
Folkways in Wonderland (FiW) is (virtual [world) music], a immersive collaborative virtual reality environment, designed to present of a selection of 50 geotagged Smithsonian Folkways tracks, built with Open Wonderland, a 100% Java open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Avatars inhabit a giant cylindrical map of the world, in which Smithsonian Folkways tracks are embedded as virtual speakers generating spatialized sound, in which to browse world music. Users can listen to tracks and browse metadata, as well as communicate via text or voice chat, enjoying preprogrammed tours or navigating the space individually.
FiW requires that Java be installed on your computer.
Click here to launch FiW.
Relevant articles and academic papers:
- FiW (folkways in Wonderland): [cyber(world]music).
- "Folkways in Wonderland: A Cyberworld Laboratory for Ethnomusicology"[1], (Rasika Ranaweera, Michael Frishkopf, and Michael Cohen), in Proceeding CW '11: Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Cyberworlds, Pages 106-112, IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA ©2011
- "(virtual [world) music]: Virtual world, world music: Folkways in Wonderland" in Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Principles and Applications of Spatial Hearing, Zao, Miyagi, Japan, November 2009. (co-authored: Rasika Ranaweera, Michael Cohen, Nick
FiW is a collaboration between Professor Michael Cohen and graduate student Rasika Ranaweera at the University of Aizu, Professor Michael Frishkopf and folkwaysAlive! at the University of Alberta, and Smithsonian Folkways at the Smithsonian Institution.