Stanford Laptop Orchestra Performs Virtually with Beijing Musicians

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 05/01/08
This week, Stanford University's Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) gave its first public concerts at the school. Founded this year by Department of Music assistant professor Ge Wang, the orchestra has 20 laptops played by human performers, as well as controllers and custom multi-channel speaker arrays.

Each key on the computer represents a note, but tilting the laptop can change the sound. Each speaker array consists of six channels of sound. The speakers were made by the musicians out of IKEA salad bowls turned upside down.

The concert, which featured musicians from Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, connected with musicians in Beijing via Webcast. According to coverage in the Mercury News, "With the aid of giant video screens, both groups will hear, watch and play along with each other."

As the orchestra's website explains, "The ensemble serves as a one-of-a-kind learning environment that explores music, computer science, composition, and live performance in a naturally interdisciplinary way."

The application used by the performers to play the music was written in ChucK, a Princeton University-developed "strongly-timed, concurrent and on-the-fly audio programming language." Wang was one of the co-creators.

A brief news report on one of the performances is shown here.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • person signing a bill at a desk with a faint glow around the document. A tablet and laptop are subtly visible in the background, with soft colors and minimal digital elements

    California Governor Signs AI Content Safeguards into Law

    California Governor Gavin Newsom has officially signed off on a series of landmark artificial intelligence bills, signaling the state’s latest efforts to regulate the burgeoning technology, particularly in response to the misuse of sexually explicit deepfakes. The legislation is aimed at mitigating the risks posed by AI-generated content, as concerns grow over the technology's potential to manipulate images, videos, and voices in ways that could cause significant harm.

  • close-up illustration of a hand signing a legislative document

    California Passes AI Safety Legislation, Awaits Governor's Signature

    California lawmakers have overwhelmingly approved a bill that would impose new restrictions on AI technologies, potentially setting a national precedent for regulating the rapidly evolving field. The legislation, known as S.B. 1047, now heads to Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. He has until the end of September to decide whether to sign it into law.

  • illustration of a VPN network with interconnected nodes and lines forming a minimalist network structure

    Report: Increasing Number of Vulnerabilities in OpenVPN

    OpenVPN, a popular open source virtual private network (VPN) system integrated into millions of routers, firmware, PCs, mobile devices and other smart devices, is leaving users open to a growing list of threats, according to a new report from Microsoft.

  • interconnected cubes and circles arranged in a grid-like structure

    Hugging Face Gradio 5 Offers AI-Powered App Creation and Enhanced Security

    Hugging Face has released version 5 of its Gradio open source platform for building machine learning (ML) applications. The update introduces a suite of features focused on expanding access to AI, including a novel AI-powered app creation tool, enhanced web development capabilities, and bolstered security measures.