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.

We routinely talk about how the interface paradigm of a computer — screen, QWERTY, trackpad – isn’t optimal for music. But how many of you have, in a pinch, done a live laptop set with just your computer, and found some way to make it work? The Stanford University Laptop Orchestra, set to play this year’s Macworld, natch, is making the most of what it has:

“We tilt the notebook and use its built-in accelerometer to expressively control sound. We use the trackpad as a kind of violin bow,” explains Ge Wang, SLOrk’s founder. ”You can make some wild, diverse music with the MacBook.”

And why not? Designing expressive interfaces can pay off in something that’s satisfying, absolutely. But however you decide to play, a lot of it comes down to how you approach an object compositionally and musically. So, there’s two ways to look at this: on one level, it’s a novelty, and while to most of us seeing people playing behind Apple logos is nothing new, I’m sure Apple enjoys seeing a swarm of their machines. But on another, the real point is that the Stanford orchestra is getting the most mileage out of the machine. Trackpad? Check. Accelerometer? Keyboard? (Why stop there – Apple Remote? Webcam?) You’ve got quite a lot on the laptop itself to use.

We’ve looked at laptop orchestras before, but here’s still more:

Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk): Musical Macs [Story for Apple Pro by Dustin Driver]

SLOrk

Via: Stanford’s MacBook orchestra exposed [distorted-loop.com] and Macworld maestro Paul Kent’s Twitter.

Previously:

Laptop Orchestras Proliferate, from Princeton to Moscow

How to Record Laptop Performances – And Make Them Sound Live (linking to a story on the topic I wrote for Keyboard Magazine)

And for the mother of modern laptop orchestras, recently winning a MacArthur Foundation grant, see PLOrk at Princeton