Dani Delgado Looking Outwards – 11

The laptop orchestra during a performance

The project I chose to research this week was the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (or SLOrk for short). This orchestra, which creates full performances by having people using controllers to generate music from more than laptops,  was founded in 2008 by Ge Wang and other students, faculty, and staff at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. They use the ChucK programming language in order to create/ synthesize sounds and design the instruments.

The controllers that can be used to generate music. The knobs at the end can be pulled and twisted by the performers which then communicates to the laptops

I find this project to be fascinating, as it requires similar skills as a normal orchestra does (in terms of cohesion, practice, and performance) but utilizes a completely new medium. I was honestly very excited to stumble across this because I was expecting to find a sole person composing music, but instead, I found this entire group working to synthesize music live which is impressive.

^A video of one of their performances

Their website

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