Cyberworld Exhibitions of Sound

Folkways in Wonderland (FiW) is (cyber [world) music], an immersive, collaborative virtual reality environment facilitating a new way to browse world music. FiW users are represented by avatars inhabiting a giant cylindrical map of the world, in which a selection of geotagged Smithsonian Folkways track segments are embedded as virtual speakers generating spatial sound. Users can navigate freely, listen to tracks together, browse metadata, communicate with one another via text or voice chat, and enjoy preprogrammed tours.

FiW is built with Open Wonderland, a 100% Java open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. To run FiW you must install Java on your computer.

Click here to access FiW (then click the "Launch" button)

or type: http://bit.ly/fiwonder

Articles and academic papers:

• Constructing a cyberworld laboratory for ethnomusicology, by Michael Davies-Venn (July 28, 2011)
• "Folkways in Wonderland: A Cyberworld Laboratory for Ethnomusicology"[1], (Rasika Ranaweera, Michael Frishkopf, and Michael Cohen), in 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 his doctoral 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.