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The Laptop as an Instrument?
An anonymous reader wonders: "As music production tools, computers are everywhere from recording and mixing to publishing. What about computers as the sole musical instrument? DJing or just playing mp3s aside, we have improvisers and orchestras that treat a laptop as a full-flavored instrument. What's the most interesting laptop-only live act you have seen/heard?"
Once upon a time, the pianoforte was the most useful tool any working musician must have. As a working musician, the laptop I have recently acquired (after decades of desktops) has rapidly shown me that things have changed. With me everywhere I go, this little blue-gray tool contains all of my full scores and I can work on my music with ease.. if I am at a gig and want to record, it is at hand to not only record but to burn copies for other people immediately. If I need to make a multi-track recording, I basically have a full music studio at hand. For those people who create electronic music using Reason or Live, the laptop is the perfect device, either sitting in a cafe and composing or high atop a mountain playing music for the nocturnal ravers (that's what they do in my town.) As far as being an instrument in itself, the laptop has every possibility of doing so, especially with a small midi input device which I have seen at school on numerous occasions. My laptop is now my best friend, and I'm sure that many other modern musicians will agree.
I've seen live sets from greg davis and Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski) that were pretty amazing. What made greg davis's performance more dynamic than one might expect out of a laptop musician is that he was also playing found natural instruments (rocks, sand, water, sticks, etc.) and feeding the sound into his Mac, which processed and amplified them back out. Definitely not for everyone, but I found it riveting.
As opposed to just playback from a laptop with little to no real-time modulation... http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?id=timex ile_us&flash=0
"Tim has spent the last year creating and perfecting a radical tool for live performance. Based entirely around Reaktor 5 and a set of customised faders and controllers, it allows him to manipulate samples and his own voice in real time. The unique Exile setup has been showcased at raves and gigs all over the UK and Europe. Native Instruments talked to Tim about his musical past, present and future, and got some very interesting answers. The interview was held at Fail Headquarters in London.
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Also, can't get to it right now, but search him on youtube and you can find videos of him performing live.
Also see Scrambledhackz...
http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/
Check the videos section...
"Technically my mind music machine was realized in form of a software, which basically consists of three modules: a pre-analyzer, a database and a synthesizer. Using the pre-analyzer it is possible to automatically split up an arbitrary amount of audio material into small musically and rhytmically meaningful snippets. For each of those snippets its sonic properties (sound signatures) are extracted by means of psychoacoustic techniques and saved in a database so that a soundpool of samples referenced by their sound signatures is becoming available.
The synthesizer analyzes an audio input stream and again splits it up into small snippets and calculates their sound signatures. For every input snippet (or actually its sound signature) the best match out of all the snippets in the database is found and each input snippet is continuously replaced by the best matching (most similar-sounding) snippet from the database.
The audio input, which can be other music or as I use it, just human voice, is virtually describing music to be automatically constructed out of samples found in the database."
Also see Merzbow...
and practically every other ebm/synth/industrial band. i just saw vnv nation and they had ibooks onstage.