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

In addition to Halloween-themed music mixes to entertain you this weekend, sounds and images from experimental to trance are echoing through the Internets this week. We’ve got the details on Create Digital Motion.

For visualists and a range of out-there-leaning audiovisual and sonic acts, France and the rest of Europe have a festival streaming online:

Festival Stream: French and European Visualists at Cinesthesy 1.0 Today and Saturday

And 11:30p US Eastern is SWiY, with more gear than we have (as pictured above):
Halloween Stream Tonight: SWiY Live Trance and Gearlust

Scare your cat and your significant other and keep the sounds going all weekend, I say. That is, if you’re not roaming America scaring up votes (that’s important, too).

To me, the ideal kind of music tech writing is when you get to spend quality time with tools for musical reasons – not simply to talk about the technology, but to make stuff. Over the past weeks, we’ve been gradually assembling ideas, sound designs, knowledge, and tutorials into a string of blog-style posts on the CDM Kore site. I’ve organized those into an evolving guide to working with Kore as a musician, from getting a handle on the basics (including some stuff that initially befuddled us when we tried to use it!), to some “experimental” techniques for pushing the envelope.

Using Kore

We’ve been spending a lot of time with Reaktor, too, so expect a follow-up with that. The idea isn’t really to advocate any tool over another one — on the contrary, for me it’s about figuring out, okay, now you’ve got something, what do you do with it?

It’s been great to get all this input from Peter Dines, Eoin, and the readers, as well (particularly Jonathan Adams Leonard) — the guide above is sort of a “collective knowledge” about the tool. Having written a book and various magazine articles, it’s a totally different experience: more learning than teaching.

On the same lines, I’ve also put together a guide to working with the Kore controller without touching the mouse. That’s part of the whole appeal to me of the Kore system, but it may not be immediately obvious how to do it. If you’ve got Kore in front of you, this will walk you in front of how to do it. I’m still learning to assimilate this with my live sets, but when I get it going it makes me really happy — I’m able to focus directly on sound.

Reference: How to Navigate Kore 2 with Hardware – No Mouse!

This is good timing, as I’m just now back from Berlin where I got to do a short set which happened to combine Ableton Live and Kore. So, separate from this other stuff, I do want to say a big thank you to everyone in Berlin who came out. It was great to meet you, and I hope to come back soon — you have a really fantastic town; I loved being there. It was really creatively inspiring.

Several bloggers were nice enough to write up / photograph the evening:
MIDI Mechanics
Hundertmarknow

– both blogs in German, but they look great; just added them to my RSS so I can keep practicing my German reading skills.

Big thanks, as well, to everyone at the DEAF Festival and in Dublin, in another wonderful and energizing town. I’ll be putting together my notes from the DEAF presentation soon to share.

I’m thrilled to be here in Berlin this week, before heading to Ireland for Dublin’s DEAF Festival. (More on that shortly.) Tuesday night, I’m playing a set at Dense Record Shop, a wonderful record store that also does live sets and has its own bar.

It’s a cozy, informal venue so if you are in Berlin, drop by and say hi — it’s a chance for all of us to meet in person. 8p sharp – 10p all over.

Dense Shop

Location

You can also find the event on Facebook

Berliners, I can’t wait! Rest of the world: more on some of the music stuff soon.

Apple is doing a live event to unveil new notebooks in Cupertino on Tuesday, confirms Engadget. It’s accompanied by one of the most unambiguous Apple teaser images ever, seen at right. (Guess they got tired of the overactive imagination of the rumor mill.) I expect this means one of two things:

1. Cosmetic changes, under-the-hood tweaks, don’t care that much. Hey, a pretty, new Apple laptop is all fine and good, don’t get me wrong. But PC notebook makers have in recent months rolled out new hardware improvements a lot faster than Apple, and often at a much lower price. That’s not to say the Apple don’t make a very good or even better deal … just that what generally happens is, looking at Apple’s lineup, improvements tend to get bundled together. Maybe I just hate the MacBook Air because it’s beautiful, I don’t know. So, I think this could be big news in the sense that people waiting to upgrade could be very happy, just not earthshaking news. Then again, what we could see is…

2. Multi-touch screens on the whole line. Now that could be interesting. Commodity touchscreens on laptops already appear imminent on PCs in general, so it’s not hard to see Apple getting into the game. And while many people rightfully point out that touch in a laptop form factor isn’t all that practical, for musical applications and live onstage use, it’s a dream.

All bets are off Tuesday.

Updated: Okay, so what we got was basically (1) — except that I missed the “and critical FireWire ports get Steved” part:

… on Create Digital Motion: New GPUs, Connectors; Non-Pro Changes and Did Apple Just Eliminate All S-Video, Composite Video Output?

… on Create Digital Music: Whither, FireWire? What the New Apple Laptop Port Changes Mean for Audio

For anyone who thinks Mac users are superficial and care only about form factor, ahem, we’re going to be talking about jacks. Got it?