In the paper, we chronicle the instantiation and adventures of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk), an ensemble of laptops, humans, hemispherical speaker arrays, interfaces, and, more recently, mobile smart phones. Motivated to deeply explore computer-mediated live performance, SLOrk provides a platform for research, instrument design, sound design, new paradigms for composition, and performance. It also offers a unique classroom combining music, technology, and live performance. Founded in 2008, SLOrk was built from the ground-up by faculty and students at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). This document describes 1) how SLOrk was built, 2) its initial performances, and 3) the Stanford Laptop Orchestra as a classroom. We chronicle its present, and look to its future.

Stanford laptop orchestra (slork)

Musicians often have the following problem: they have a music score that requires 2 or more players, but they have no one with whom to practice. So far, score-playing music robots exist, but they lack adaptive abilities to synchronize with fellow players' tempo variations. In other words, if the human speeds up their play, the robot should also increase its speed. However, computer accompaniment systems allow exactly this kind of adaptive ability. We present a first step towards giving these accompaniment abilities to a music robot. We introduce a new paradigm of beat tracking using 2 types of sensory input - visual and audio - using our own visual cue recognition system and state-of-the-art acoustic onset detection techniques. Preliminary experiments suggest that by coupling these two modalities, a robot accompanist can start and stop a performance in synchrony with a flutist, and detect tempo changes within half a second.

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Robot musical accompaniment: integrating audio and visual cues for real-time synchronization with a human flutist

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Collaborative textual improvisation in a laptop ensemble

ChucK is a programming language designed for computer music. It aims to be expressive and straightforward to read and write with respect to time and concurrency, and to provide a platform for precise audio synthesis and analysis and for rapid experimentation in computer music. In particular, ChucK defines the notion of a strongly timed audio programming language, comprising a versatile time-based programming model that allows programmers to flexibly and precisely control the flow of time in code and use the keyword now as a time-aware control construct, and gives programmers the ability to use the timing mechanism to realize sample-accurate concurrent programming. Several case studies are presented that illustrate the workings, properties, and personality of the language. We also discuss applications of ChucK in laptop orchestras, computer music pedagogy, and mobile music instruments. Properties and affordances of the language and its future directions are outlined.

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Chuck: A strongly timed computer music language

This commentary describes my recent approach to writing compositions for the ensemble performance of computer music. Drawing on experimental music and improvisation, I contend that such music is best considered in terms of people’s situated and relational interplay. The compositional and performative question that permeates this thesis is ‘what can we do, in this time and space, with these tools available to us?’.


As themes of equality and egalitarian access underpin this work throughout, I highlight my engagement with Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) ideology and community, reflecting on how this achieves my aims. I describe my writing of text score compositions, making use of the term bounded improvisation, whose purposeful requirements for indeterminate realisation extends most current computer-based performance practice. Though no single strand of this research is perhaps unusual by itself, such an assemblage as that outlined above (incorporating composition, computer coding and ensemble performance practice) is, when allied to an understanding of electronic and computer music praxis, currently an underdeveloped approach. Such an approach I have thus chosen to term free open computer music.


I incorporate two further pre-existing conceptual formulations to present a framework for constructing, reflecting on, and developing my work in this field. Firstly flow or 'immersed experience' is useful to explicate difficult to capture aspects of instrumental engagement and ensemble performance. Secondly, this portfolio of scores aims to produce well-constructed situations, facilitating spaces of flow which contain within their environments the opportunity for an event to take place.


I present the outcomes of my practice as place-forming tactics that catalyse something to do, but not what to do, in performative spaces such as those described above. Such intentions define my aims for composition. These theoretical concerns, together with an allied consideration of the underpinning themes highlighted above, is a useful framework for refection and evaluation of this work.

Being sound : FLOSS, flow and event in the composition and ensemble performance of free open computer music

The Carnegie Mellon Laptop Orchestra (CMLO) is a
collection of computers that communicate through a
wireless network and collaborate to generate music. The
CMLO is the culmination of a course on Computer Music
Systems and Information Processing, where students learn
and apply techniques for audio and MIDI programming,
real-time synchronization and scheduling, music
representation, and music information retrieval.

Jeffrey Grafton

Papers

The Carnegie Mellon Laptop Orchestra