Here's Suzanne Vega in 2006 doing an interview and performing Tom's Diner live in Second Life. Before singing, Vega explains why she's often called the "mother of the MP3." From Wagner James Au's New World Notes blog post on August 4, 2006:
In future live performances in-world, you have to think major artists and personalities would be best served by "puppeteers" who can control the avatar, firing off a series of animations (playing music, dancing, and so on), when appropriate, leaving the musicians free to perform. (A HUD driven system with a number of pre-loaded animations and gestures that can be called up at a single click would work almost as well.) Speech animations would be an enormous advance in this regard, though it's unclear when (if?) Linden Lab will implement those anytime soon.
But all that aside for now. With Julian Dibbell, Kurt Vonnegut, and now Suzanne Vega, this week's an enormous milestone in Second Life's history: the moment, perhaps, when the virtualization of all culture into an ever-expanding metaverse began to seem like our inevitable future.
Dibbell is now an attorney and Vonnegut is dead.
