Folkways in Wonderland: A Cyberworld Laboratory for Ethnomusicology

In this paper we describe a musical cyber world - a collaborative, immersive virtual environment for browsing musical databases - together with an experimental design launching a new sub discipline: the ethnomusicology of controlled musical cyberspaces. Research in ethnomusicology, the ethnographic study of music in its socio-cultural environment, has typically been conducted through qualitative fieldwork in uncontrolled, real-world settings. Recently, ethnomusicologists have begun to attend to the study of virtual environments, including pre-existing cyber worlds (such as video games). However, in this paper, we adopt an unprecedented approach by designing a custom musical cyber world to serve as a virtual laboratory for the ethnographic study of music. By constructing an immersive cyber world suitable for ethno musicological fieldwork, we aim for much greater control than has heretofore been possible in ethno musicological research, leading to results that may suggest better ways of designing musical cyber worlds for research, discovery, learning, entertainment, and e-commerce, as well as contributing towards our general understanding of the role of music in human interaction and community-formation. Such controlled research can usefully supplement traditional ethnography in the real world.