Cyberworld Exhibitions of Sound

Short URL for this page: http://bit.ly/FiWonder

Folkways in Wonderland (FiW) is (cyber [world) music], an immersive, collaborative virtual reality environment facilitating a new way to browse music of the world. FiW users are represented by avatars inhabiting a giant cylindrical map, 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, or 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 the FiW page, then click the "Launch" button to download the file Wonderland.jnlp. Double-click this file to start the FiW cyberworld. Alternatively, use the abbreviated URL: http://bit.ly/fiwonder NB: presently under maintenance.

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 Proc. of the Conf. on Cyberworlds, Pages 106-112, IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA ©2011
• "(virtual [world) music]: Virtual world, world music: Folkways in Wonderland" in Proc. of the Int. Workshop on the Principles and Applications of Spatial Hearing, Zao, Miyagi, Japan, November 2009. (co-authored: Rasika Ranaweera, Michael Cohen, Nick Nagel, and Michael Frishkopf)

FiW is a collaboration between Professor Michael Cohen and 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.