The Machine Orchestra explodes the idea of a laptop orchestra, building a full-blown machine ensemble of the future. We turn to guest writer Jordan, a member of the ensemble, to look behind the scenes in a couple of articles. Rejoin us for part two later this week. -Ed.

Welcome to the world of Dr. Ajay Kapur and Michael Darling, the two California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) professors behind a novel laptop powered ensemble, the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra. Inspired by the work of visionary laptop ensemble pioneers and long-time friends Dan Trueman, Perry Cook (PLORk) and Ge Wang (SLOrk), Kapur has assembled a powerhouse of technical minds and creative musicians to create a laptop group unique in its own right. Backed by Kapur’s background in Musical Robotics and sensor systems, and Darling’s years of experience in technical theater design and mechanical engineering, the Machine Orchestra is taking the “laptop ensemble” into new territories.

With both the recent posts on musical robotics here on CDM and the debut of the Machine Orchestra at REDCAT / Walt Disney Theatre (LA) just days away, what better time to introduce the Machine Orchestra? The following is the first of a series of posts which I will be guest-writing here at CDM on the creation of the Machine Orchestra, the artists behind it, and the all-new undergraduate powerhouse that is the CalArts Music Technology: Intelligence, Interaction, and Design (MTIID) program.

For today’s article, I got to sit down and pick the minds of the conductors themselves, so without further ado, welcome Ajay Kapur and Michael Darling.

KarmetiK Machine Orchestra – REDCAT Preview from KarmetiK on Vimeo.

Running a daily website is something of a controlled experiment in the passions of an enthusiastic community. 2009 was a year in which musicians pulled no punches in debating the merits not only of tools themselves, but of the ideas behind them. What follows is not the “best” of 2009, but the “biggest” – the stories that inflamed passions and got readers clicking and commenting. Some top lists include the items about which everyone agrees. This is the list of what got everyone arguing.

Software of the year: Propellerhead Record

For all the major releases and upgrades and gear, as well as the dominance of a certain Berlin-based developer, if you had to pick one application of 2009, it’d be Record. Record tops the list not because everyone dropped everything to go use it, but quite the contrary. Record bucked industry trends, and provided a love-it-or-hate-it view of what audio software could be. In other words, it was quite reminiscent of Reason.

Centered on a mixer, emphasizing “recording” (perish the thought), and omitting expected features like MIDI out and plug-in support, Record resists modern-day conventional wisdom. That was divisive enough, even before the debates began over Record’s new hardware key. In the long run, it may be the simple fact that Record brings audio signal to Reason that gives it staying power. But in 2009, Record was the application about which everyone had an opinion.

See our original preview, May, plus details on the "Ignition Key" authorization system

Developer of the year: Ableton

What a year it’s been for Ableton. The company kicked off the year with “Share,” “Extend,” and “Touch,” as well as the release of Live 8. It sounded simple. But Ableton’s tech dominated CDM headlines in ‘09 with the variety of user tips and tricks, rants and raves. How’d they do?

For a generation of musicians of nearly every genre, the laptop has become an instrument. It’s easy to take for granted, but the rise of the computer for music has been remarkable. Less than twenty years ago, real-time digital synthesis and audio processing was the domain of expensive, specialized workstations. Now, $700 per seat can buy you a full-blown musical rig, with the computer hardware, gestural input courtesy the Nintendo Wii controller, and even a DIY speaker made from IKEA salad bowls. The next challenge is to make this setup as flexible and reliable as possible. Enter Linux.

According with the laptop’s graduation to instrument status, laptops orchestras have spread worldwide, inspired especially by the innovative Princeton Laptop Orchestra (“PLOrk”) directed by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook. PLOrk’s alumnus Ge Wang has even gone on to greater fame making applications for the iPhone via ocarina and T-Pain app developer Smule. The sounds of these ensembles may sometimes be strange, but by pushing laptop performance, the groups are a great place to look for how to get the most out of computer music, whatever your tastes may be.

Virginia Tech’s L2Ork’s claim to faim is that it’s a laptop orchestra powered by Linux. Why does that matter? For one, it makes a big difference on cost. By using Linux-powered netbooks, they’ve slashed the per-student cost from that of the Mac laptops used in some other ensembles, on a machine that’s more compact. Far from making sacrifices to save money, the result is actually  greater reliability, flexibility, efficiency, and audio performance.

As with the PLOrk ensemble, L2Ork combines expressive input with open-ended digital sound making production, localizing the sound near the computer itself using hemispherical speakers. In this way, the laptop instrument can attempt to learn something from acoustic instruments, which are played with human gestures and have sound sources that are positioned physically where the instrument is.

L2Ork

You don’t have to enroll at Virginia Tech to apply these lessons to your own music making, however. You can apply the lessons of the L2Ork ensemble to put together your own Linux audio machine. They’ve even further-documented the process of making PLOrk’s signature “salad bowl” speakers. And you can do it all without breaking the bank.

Smule, the folks who brought simulated Ocarina to the iPhone, are now thinking multiplayer. Instead of just playing a machine or a few of your friends as in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, Smule’s latest app turns your creations into a reality show with online judging. And the killer app itself? It’s a simulated, touch trombone.

It’s pretty wacky stuff, but Smule’s had some hits on their hands already, so I think the wackiness may be part of their secret. And it comes from a heavy hitter: Dr. Ge Wang, the founder, is also a professor at Stanford’s CCARMA research center, director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLORK to the East Coast’s PLORK), and creator of the ChucK Programming Language.

New in this version:

• Teaching tools: Floating leaves guide first-time musicians to learn songs in “self tutorial” mode, and a browser-based composition tool helps teach you to compose.
• Global judging: Online audiences can judge songs with emoticons and text and a 1-10 scale. Everything is integrated with the app itself (see image). Tromboning with the Stars, anyone?
• The Power of Silliness: The most important feature, though, may be that everyone sounds a little goofy playing it, which can actually be liberating. As Dr. Ge Wang puts it, “It’s like singing in the shower.” Well, except with judges.

The app is simple, but the concept I think is pretty remarkable. We’ve seen interactive instruments, and we’ve seen music games. By adding the judging element, though, this is a free-form instrument that can also be a game. Now, without getting too ahead of ourselves, you could do the same thing with a Worldwide Online Kazoo Contest. In fact, maybe that’s a great idea. I suppose you could say music itself can be a kind of social game, played out on a stage. But nonetheless, making it an iPhone app can help free people up to get that message.

Oh, yeah, and got any doubts about the business model for open source? ChucK is a completely free, ridiculously powerful programming language for synthesis. It’s infinitely deeper than Leaf Trombone. But that power, packaged for a broad audience, can become a hit business – and likely to be popular well beyond musicians. If that’s possible, I imagine more could be soon. Remember, too, that whatever the Apple fanboys tell you, the iPhone is not a dominant mobile platform – nowhere close. Apple’s proprietary hardware means it isn’t really intended to be.

I hope someone working on platforms like Symbian and Google Android takes note: pack in geeky, nuclear-powered synthesis features, and people will find ways to put them to use in consumer apps that appeal to everyone. Leave them out, and you miss the boat. Or the trombone, anyway.

Direct iTunes App Link [99 cents]

http://smule.com/

Now, some very amusing videos of this thing in action:

Sometimes, audio products come in sexy, exciting packages. But sometimes, they simply solve a set of problems. And the products that fit into the latter category can be as beloved (dare I say sexy), if not more so.

Since I first saw a prototype in the fall, I’ve been eagerly awaiting trying out Cakewalk’s V-Studio 100. It immediately resonated with features I wanted to see in hardware. Rather than talk the specs, let’s talk about the kind of problems you might like to solve in your mobile rehearsal, production, and performance rig:

• You want to mix live, but don’t want to carry a mixer. You’ve got a laptop set, but you’re mixing it with other sources – and you want to be able to add live instruments / voices / Nintendo DS / circuit-bent creations to your main output without routing through the computer (which also saves your bacon when the machine crashes / you accidentally overload the CPU in Live)
• You want to record your live sessions. ‘Nuff said. Sure, you have a portable recorder, but then you have to patch it in…
• A lot of the time, you reach for the mouse because a control surface wasn’t convenient. And then there’s the fact that, while keyboards now often have mixer controls, the faders aren’t motorized.
• You want to carry less gear, but you really need an audio mixer and some live effects and some recording and a control surface for your software mix.

And, of course, yours truly has been sort of encouraging all of these problems with talk of Game Boys and iPhones and custom-built Theremins and actually playing live instruments and pushing your Live set to the envelope and … oh yeah, then you want to record the whole thing.

I can’t vouch for whether the V-Studio 100 fulfills all my wishes just yet, because I don’t have the thing here. But while there are inevitable compromises in multi-function designs, the V-Studio 100 is set up in a way that appears to come close to what I think a whole lot of us need as laptop musicians. And despite the Cakewalk name, it’s actually aimed at users of a variety of Mac and Windows tools: