While spring classes begin and students get back into the school grind, a small group of musicians is preparing to go on tour making music in unusual ways.
The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana is a group of seven students, one professor and one assistant professor dedicated to playing music using laptops, Wii remotes, joysticks, iPads and other “instruments” to produce a unique style reminiscent of music featured in science-fiction movies.
“We’re trying to find interesting angles,” said Jeff Albert, experimental music and digital media graduate student. “They make you experiment with different parts of musicianship.”
Albert said the group also uses real instruments, including trombone, tuba, flute and voices, but does not use a piano.
“Our objective is to create new and different musicians and a different way to be musically virtuosic,” he said. “It’s a way of engaging people in the music.”
  Video: Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana
 
LOL is going on a four-city southern tour to Mobile, Ala., and Atlanta, Columbus and Athens, Ga., according to Stephen Beck, director of the Laptop Orchestra and Haymon professor of composition and computer music and Center for Computation and Technology faculty. He said the group will also perform April 4 in the Manship Theatre.
Beck said everyone in the group is responsible for writing programs, performing and creating the music.
“We write our own software. … It’s like creating compositions,” Beck said.
The group types codes as it is playing music, along with
manipulating joysticks or cameras in the laptops to create different sounds, Beck said. Some pieces are improvised while others are memorized.
LOL uses Apple computers, but Beck said most of the software the group uses does not depend on the computer brand.
Beck said Apple computers work best for the group because they cater to people who are not familiar with computers and to people who are computer savvy.
“It’s an environment that gives us the best of both worlds,” he said.
Beck also said the UNIX core in Apple computers prevents the whole project from crashing if one part of it fails, which would be catastrophic in the middle of a performance.
Programs the group uses include Max for audio and video, and Chuck, a lower level of programming language of audio and video, according to Beck.
Members of the Laptop Orchestra are currently building their own hemispherical speakers to create better sounds for performances.
“They become the instrument’s body to mimic acoustic sounds,” said Jesse Allison, assistant professor of experimental music and digital media and CCT faculty member.
Allison said the hemispherical speakers also supercede average speakers because they do not have as much of a disconnect between speakers.
They allow sound to travel in all directions from the speaker
instead of in just one direction, making it easier for members to play with one another.
LOL began in spring 2009 as a graduate-student seminar class focused on researching and trying new ideas of laptop programming and technology that escalated into what it is today, Beck said.
“The class is an experimental lab, and the performing ensemble is the fruit of those experiments,” Albert said.
Funding for the organization comes through the Senate for Computation and Technology and a Center for Digital Innovation Grant, Beck said.
Lindsey Hartman, experimental music and digital media
graduate student, is the only female in the group, but she said although it is a different experience for her to be the only woman, it is a part of musicianship.
“As a musician, you get used to different things,” she said.
Hartman said the computer and electronic fields are currently dominated by men.
Beck expressed excitement about the development of technology from his college days.
“The level of performance, capability and scale is six levels of magnitude higher,” Beck said.   Read: Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana is praiseworthy, innovative
 
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Contact Meredith Will at [email protected]