Nov. 19: Harvey

Virtual Worlds: An Ethnomusicological Perspective

Author: Dr. Trevor Harvey (Ethnomusicology123 <3 <3 <3)
Dr. Trevor Harvey is a lecturer at the University of Iowa Voxman School of Music. His main areas of expertise are in Ethnomusicology and Musicology. He earned his BA Brigham Young University, and his graduate degrees at Florida State University (Go Noles!) Dr. Harvey has held positions at Florida State University and Middle Tennessee State University. He serves as the editor of Ethnomusicology Today on the Society for Musicology website as well as presenting at multiple conferences including the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and Society of Musicology.

Overview
This article covers the author’s journey of interviewing different participants of the site Second Life. He covers aspects of performer to audience relations in Second Life where users take on a second life and interact with one another through different channels. The main channel that most users get to interact with one another is the live concerts that take place on the site itself. This article then goes into detail about how certain performers feel about performing on the virtual stage vs on the real stage and how they connect personally with these performances.

Concepts that Interested Me

  • In the Music in Virtual Worlds section came up, the author brought up how “live performances are conceived as social events — circumscribed times and spaces defined as socially interactive gathering places for participant avatars” and this made me think and wonder if we are avatars when we participate in live performances offline.
  • Second Life is all about letting users escape their own world and participate in another world living another life. Yet when you go online, the site lets the users be engaged in concerts that take place online and in a way that is no different to what we would do in our real life. Except that it is open to others to freely experience it from the comforts of their own home. This makes me rethink what a “live” concert and performance is online vs in real life offline.
  • Musicking making an appearance in the form of Crystal Sands typing lyrics in the chat function during her performance. I thought this was a unique and different way for me to understand Musicking.
  • The idea of immediate feedback in Second Life is brought to a light that I didn’t think about when I was reading this article. In an interview with Rich, he talks about how in live performances, we get feedback at the end of concerts whether it is onsite or in letters and emails to the orchestra. In Second Life, the audience gets to interact in the chat function and give feedback quickly. I think that is a different experience than what we are normally used to and I found this to be interesting.
  • Overall, I found this article to be interesting and more than what I expected when I started it vs how it ended and it makes me want to partake in one of these events.

Discussion Questions

  1. Have you ever been involved with a site or even a video game that is similar to Second Life and did it have any music performing concepts?
  2. Damien Carbonell talked about the mental shift from performing offline venues vs performing online. He said it takes getting used to and how we don’t normally get the “buzz” from performing in person vs online. Do you think that, in this current climate of COVID-19 and virtual performances, that we will get used to these virtual performances and will it be a little jarring to return to the stage with live audiences one day?
  3. If Second Life came to be now, do you think more musicians would take part in it as a way to perform in a more unique performance style as compared to a livestream?

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