Talk (and fiddle) in SecondLife

Posted by jerry on August 4th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Music, New media, Technology

With the latest release of SecondLife comes a talk function – so I was eager to test it out. Anya Ixchel and Ailja Writer were already online and they were testing the talk function too. I invited them over to my modest block of land and was quickly joined by Sharon aka Teal Etzel, and soon we figured out the new menus and talked about talk. The quality wasn’t bad from my end – although the processing speed meant a slight delay between talking and hearing. And as more bandwidth was used the voices became a little broken – at one point I sounded like a Dalek from Dr Who!

But the real test came when I played fiddle through the talk function – it was hilarious! Anya rezzed up a dance object and soon all the avatars were dancing so I pulled out the Guarnerius violin from my inventory and set my avatar playing while I played in real life. And it worked really well – my first live concert in SL 🙂

SL fiddle

Interestingly some of the SL neighbours also flew in to see what the fuss was about, so we gave the function a good test with in the end about seven avatars together and nearby.

Certainly this build is MUCH more stable than the beta “FirstLook” version, and it was easy to set up the talk function. But the sound was much better through Sharon’s MacBook laptop than through the mac G5 as the desktop one seemed to pick up a lot of hard-drive noise. It also worked much better through headphones in order to prevent echo from the mic picking up the voice on its return through the speakers. So it can take a bit of practice to get the levels right. In the end I managed to get a reasonable talk quality.

3 Comments

Comment by Alja

The only thing I can add to this post: Where do I sign up for the next concert? 🙂

IMHO voice is going to bring another dimension to Second Life, and so far I like the changes I see. Thanks again for the unforgettable moment!

Posted on August 4, 2007 at 5:15 pm

Pingback by Voice in Second Life « Angela A Thomas

[…] All four of us experienced technical difficulties to begin with, and I have to say getting it working is not for the faint of heart or the (like me) easily-frustrated-when-technology-doesn’t-do-what-you-want.  But after maybe an hour or so, it was all sorted out and we’d launched into a full scale party, with Jerry playing his fiddle (Jerry is an incredible musician!), all of us dancing, and lots and lots of laughter.  Jerry has a photo and a great write-up here. It was lovely to hear Alja’s Slovenian accent and to learn how to pronounce her name properly!  We had a few other people come and go – one guy was practising his English on us – and it was all wonderfully entertaining.  It was fun to share the experience at an entirely new level – so much so that when one of my other friends came along who didn’t have voice enabled, we felt terribly sorry for her because she was missing out on all the hilarities. […]

Posted on August 4, 2007 at 9:48 pm

Comment by Halt Bismal

Yes I’d like to sign up for the next concert as well!

Posted on August 5, 2007 at 2:21 am

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