Woove staff writer Todd Stafford interviews Ico Bukvic, director of the Linux Laptop Orchestra.

The Linux Laptop Orchestra offers a unique and stimulating musical performance experience, whether your tastes tend towards playing Wii with your friends or the somewhat more high-minded realm of avant classical and compositional music appreciation.   Operating a networked group of notebook-style computers with the popular Wii-mote controllers, the Linux Laptop Orchestra provides a new vision of ensemble performance.  Playing electronic and electro-acoustic works written specifically for the extraordinary group, L2Ork also provides a venue for cutting-edge approaches to composition.  Beyond the actual interface, performances diverge from the norm both sonically and conceptually insofar as each laptop workstation is attached to its own six-channel omni-directional speaker.  This speaker system enables the L2Ork to re-introduce the spatial aspects of ensemble performance that have often been lost to the use of dedicated Public Address systems in more traditional electronic music concerts. The Linux Laptop Orchestra (or L2Ork) is a project of the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio (DISIS) at Virginia Tech, which is led by Professor Ico Bukvic, a world-renowned composer and sound designer who has directed, conducted, and composed most of the works played by the group.  The L2Ork has two scheduled performances Saturday, April 9 at 7pm and 8pm in the Squires Recital Salon.

Another way to look at this is:  the performance on Saturday, April 9th in the Squires Recital Salon is broken in to two parts.  The L2Ork will separately showcase their outreach to the Boys and Girls club of Roanoke in the first performance at 7pm and offer a performance of their latest work at 9pm.  The ticket proceeds will be donated to the Boys and Girls club.  Last April, the Spring L2Ork performance followed a similar format, with an exciting performance by the actual participants of the Boys and Girls Club during the first hour, followed by a more formal performance by the L2Ork and several musical guests, including Matthew Burtner (UVA), Ron Coulter (SIUC), Mark Engebretson (UNCG), and Virginia Tech’s soprano Chelsea Crane.  During this performance, L2Ork played several stunning compositions.  Of these, Bukvic’s chilling use of Crane's operatic and spoken voice alongside adventurous and microtonal compositions in the stately "Citadel" and the timely Chernobyl-themed "Half-life" were most memorable.  Matthew Burtner played electro-acoustic compositions on what he called a meta-sax, combining remote servo robotics, aleatoric compositional approach, and the familiar sounds of a saxophone to pleasing effect.   Coulter’s work focused primarily on avant garde percussion, while Engebretson and Bukvic collaborated on a work featuring brass instrumentation, sequencing on a drum pad designed for the Ableton compositional software, and patches written in the Max/MSP environment.  The Saturday, April 9th performance will feature further guest performances by Coulter and other guest offerings by Brad Garton, Peter Kirn, and Dave Phillips.

L2Ork’s community engagement extends beyond their support for the Boys and Girls Club in Roanoke.  Since the hardware used by the ensemble is unusual, Bukvic and his students and collaborators at DISIS needed to produce a custom software interface.   Displaying the commitment to Free and Open Source Software that increasingly characterizes DIY computer culture, L2Ork wrote this software in the PureData (PD) environment. PD is like a visual programming language designed with audio-visual performance in mind; it is licensed in such a way as to be customizable and re-distributable.  In this way, the patches created to run L2Ork contribute to a growing body of common resources for sound design and music production; additionally, by committing to the GNU/Linux operating system for the computers, Bukvic has simultaneously kept the L2Ork’s costs low and provided a venue to demonstrate the robustness of this community-oriented software platform.  

Bukvic’s DISIS lab does more than provide a home for the L2Ork.  On November 7th, 2010, students from this lab showcased a variety of electronic, aleatoric, and electro-acoustic works at the “Max Crash” event.   The genres represented were quite diverse.  Perhaps most accessible were the sweet acoustic compositions supplemented by gauze-like layers of sound performed by local singer-songwriter Maya Renfro, in particular her haunting “Paper Dolls.”  At the other end of the spectrum, some selections featured cacophonous noises and soundscapes that just barely crossed the threshold of intelligibility while still maintaining audience interest.  The interest in gaming that underwrites some of L2Ork’s work made a somewhat different appearance during the title work “Max Crash,” which created a music performance from a game-like collaborative interface built around the Max/MSP software platform.  The DISIS lab itself features audio workstations loaded with many of the top audio, sound synthesis, animation, and music compositional software packages; even so, during both the November 7th “Max Crash” event and the April 24, 2009 DISIS lab event, many of the best non-L2Ork performances used the Max/MSP platform, sometimes using the Jitter animation engine to create visual interest.

Previous performances by the L2Ork have proven the versatility of the ensemble and each subsequent event shows profound development of the actual performers, the hardware, the software, and the compositions.  Both by satisfying curiosity about how the “low” culture of video games can meet the “high” culture of classical music and by giving an opportunity for Blacksburg to experience sophisticated and cutting-edge music, L2Ork has significantly enriched regional culture while simultaneously putting Virginia Tech on the metaphorical map to the world of conceptual art and performance.

After the Fall 2010 DISIS performance, the Woove caught up with Professor Bukvic for an interview about L2Ork, DISIS, the relationship between gaming and music, the current state of computer-assisted musical performance, and his own organizational, artistic, and compositional philosophies.

Be sure to visit the Linux Laptop Orchestra's webpage, the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermeia Studio at Virginia Tech's webpage , and Professor Bukvic's ePortfolio .