RCM Laptop Orchestra

Power, C(h)ords and Keyboards

Wed, 19 May 2010 15:34:39 +0100

The RCM Laptop Orchestra finally gave its official debut concert today to a very enthusiastic mixture of family, friends, staff and composition students. The programme included,

- Solo electronics & guitar work by Tim Yates
- Consonance and Consequence for Viola D’amore + Strings and Laptop Orchestra
- Saxophone & electronics “Dysmoprhic” by David Rafferty
- Drones for Laptop Orchestra by Tim Yates
- Fractals by James Lill

The concert was recorded for sound and video and a video will be uploaded soon! As the RCM Laptop Orchestra has been a personal project of mine over the past year it was a great end to the year and we’ve learned a great deal about the specific difficulties and opportunities an ensemble like this can offer. I will make a sister post to this one for details about my concert piece ‘Consonance and Consequence’ for Viola D’amore + strings and Laptop Orchestra which was premiered in this concert.

RCM Laptop Orchestra Concert

Sun, 16 May 2010 11:26:00 +0100

Wednesday May 19th - RCM Studios

Feel free to come!! It’s free and it’s our first proper concert with the Laptop Orchestra. We’ll be playing pieces by

First Networked Rehearsal

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:41:34 +0000

Rehearsal began with the excellent organisation of gear by Michael Oliva who has prepared a flight case of Laptop Orchestra gear for the concert. 1 router, 1 network switch, 2 mixers, a PA, everyone’s laptops, hundreds of mini-jack adaptors and one million network cables later we had Tim Yates’ networked laptop instrument up and running on almost all computers (a slight network port miscalculation but this will be rectified for next week).

Concerts and patches!

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:25:10 +0000

Laptop Orchestral rehearsal was again a fun and productive session. Following a meeting with Michael Oliva, Area Leader for Electroacoustic Music, we have confirmed a concert in collaboration with the RCM Centre for Music and Multimedia (CMM) to include various exciting pieces for instruments and electronics. We have also penciled in a date for the RCM Laptop Orchestra main concert which will feature more pieces after the Easter holiday. The proposed dates are currently

March 17th - CMM Forum + RCM Laptops

May 19th - RCM Laptops in Concert

Rehearsal this week allowed us to plan our rehearsal schedule in preparation for the concert and we discovered some new and exciting ideas for the gig. This included the potential for an performance using 4-5 iPhones/iPod Touch units, practice using Adam Scott Neal’s ‘FreqOut’ and ‘Presets’ Laptop Orchestra pieces, and the further development of our improvisation techniques using ‘open software’.

A piece by Tim - current member

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:17:25 +0000

Current member of Laptop Orchestra, Tim Yates, is a composer and guitarist at the RCM and has made significant progress on his networked laptop piece. We had a small technical session to test his new instrument designed specifically for the RCM Laptop Orchestra using 3 sound generators and 9 laptop performers all vying for control of the sounds basic waveforms and frequency ratios among other effects such as phasing and distortion.