photo: Phil McPhee
The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra

The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of 50 performers, each working with a laptop as their instrument. Custom software for the ensemble was produced to enable wireless communication, and the composition of new musical works undertaken by composers Angie Atmadjaja, Jethro Bagust, Alex Harker (with Matt Posstle, Trumpet) . The systems were performed at two concerts of "Worldscape", a 3hr multimedia entertainment, by students of the Music Department at the University of York, UK.

Technology is now commonplace and essential to many aspects of musical performance, and the last ten years has seen an exponential growth in the number of musicians and ensembles using computers for live music making. With the Worldscape Laptop Orchestra, we set out to specifically investigate how new methods of musical creativity would be suitable for a large number of performers.

Laptop Orchestras themselves are not new; since the 1970s many ensembles have chosen to continuously stretch the limits of emerging technology (such as The Hub, Rhythm and Noise, and recently an advanced fifteen member laptop orchestra from Princeton University)*. It is clear that digital performance has a stable future, but how can the next steps towards larger-scale interactivity be made?

It is rare to have the opportunity to assemble 50 laptop performers in the same space for a musical event, and the resulting challenges are both technical and musical. In technology, existing solutions to audio-over-wireless networking which would otherwise be perfectly acceptable for small-scale ensembles of under 20 performers can run into significant performance issues when applied to larger forces. We wished to present a clean and modern aesthetic, free from nineteenth century ideas of what an instrument is supposed to do or sound like, and it was essential that our performers were cable and clutter-free.

Musically, the computer is a new instrument, and is treated here on it’s own terms. The sound made by the orchestra does not replicate or emulate traditional instruments in any way: instead, the orchestra (in this sense taken to mean 'sounding together') is treated very much like a vast and very expressive, human-controlled synthesiser.

Supported by Apple Computer, the performers were able to communicate the large amounts of control and gestural data generated by this ensemble to a series of audio servers via high-bandwidth AirPort Extreme networking solutions. Each performer communicates their information to the others through custom software written specifically for the event by the composers in the Pure Data (Miller Puckett, UCSD) and MaxMSP(Cycling 74) audio programming languages.

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References

Truman,D. Why a Laptop Orchestra, Organised Sound 10(3): 255–66.
Pure Data: Miller Puckett
Max/MSP: Cycling 74
Other Laptop Orchestras

Papers, and documentation site in preparation.