Looking to create the largest digital ensemble of its kind anywhere in the world, 50 music students from the University of York performed three orchestral pieces written on and involving Apple laptop computers at a concert this week. The full range of Apple software was used in the performance – including video detection where hand movements of performers are decoded by Apple Macbooks into musical events. The 50 laptops of The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra use wireless internet to communicate, sharing audio and control data. The concert this week was and two others will be streamed live from the University’s Web site. According to the Guardian.com, floods of amplified music filled the cavernous university building in York, while conductor Ambrose Field used a range of new gestures to draw out mouse movements and triple clicks. Other music was activated by players making hand movements which were filmed and turned into music by the laptops' inbuilt cameras. In one of three pieces specially written for the event, the computers also played counterpoint to a jazz trumpeter in a partnership designed to "test the possibilities of digital sound". Although one of the works, written by Field and two graduate students, was an improvisation, most of the music followed the traditional stave. Field, whose musicians dressed in formal black and used Apple MacBooks, told the Guardian: "This is obviously innovative but at the same time we want to keep and use the human interaction which is part of a symphony orchestra." As well as the conducting novelties, this involved laptop liaison which allowed each musician to hear the others - central to success in traditional orchestras - and not to get entirely absorbed in the screen. Field said: "There was a danger that it might end up looking like 50 people writing emails together, but we think we've avoided that."
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