The laptop orchestra is a group of 15 or more computer musicians performing live, and Ge Wang is the Stanford Professor who brought the laptop orchestra to his university after seeing what they accomplished at Princeton. But behind every great computer musician is great software. In this case, that software is ChucK. As part of the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547), Ge Wang discusses this revolutionary new software.
In the first part of this talk, Ge presents the design, philosophy, and development of ChucK, a computer music programming language intending to provide a different approach, expressiveness, and thinking with respect to time and parallelism in audio programming – as well as a platform for precise and rapid experimentation. In the second part of this presentation, Ge describes his adventures with the “laptop orchestra”: a new type of large-scale, computer-mediated music ensemble.