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?"

Comments

There's only one answer.

[TodMinuit]

What's the most interesting laptop-only live act you have seen/heard?

A well-played Unreal Tournament match.

"HAT TRICK!"
[Gun fire]
"5... 4... 3... 2... 1!"
[Gun fire; Explosions; Crazy]
"FIRST BLOOD!"
"MUILTI-KILL..MEGA-KILL!"

And so on.

XP

[islanduniverse]

Does the windows startup sound count?

Mashups!

[mathletics]

The best laptop performance I've ever seen is a guy called Girl Talk. He makes whole songs out of pieces of pop songs. A lot of work goes into editing the pieces to make them fit, but they are still comprised of almost no original content. If you can find the song "smash your head," it's an excellent introduction. The other killer act I've seen is Dev/Null. His music is completely original, but I wouldn't be surprised if I get a few "this is not music" replies. Check out "bolt thrower in a chinese restaurant" or "nitrous induced skull fracture".

The laptop is a musician's greatest friend

[joaquin gray]

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.

Laptop artists

[Sen No Ongaku]

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.

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[account_deleted]

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Tim Exile

[kennylogins]

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. " 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...

Re:Tim Exile

[soliptic]

Yeah, I was gonna mention Tim Exile too, although I would do, cos I know him :)

I've actually had a play on the system he built (well, I had a play about 3-4 years ago, I dare say he's changed it a lot since then. A constant work in progress as far as I could tell...). It's a lot of fun.

See timexile.com for more info and (I expect) tunes / vids etc. Oh, there's also a mass technical interview / Q&A with him here.

Right, I'm getting back to work before I read the usual surprisingly stone-age slashdot schtick that comes up on music related stories. You know, if it involves any sort of technology it's cheating, it doesn't take any skill whatsoever, it shouldn't even be called music, I could make that crap in five minutes, you'd never get this back when men were men and Zep were Zep..

The laptop as an instrument...

[Half a dent]

...of torture.

Supporting certain sales laptops seems like that anyway!

Laptop for live instrument

[IV-Swamp]

I have been composing and performing with midi for about 15 years and using computers live for about 10 years. I usually use a rack mounted standard PC for all of my VST instruments via V-Stack. I may start using Kore but I just started messing with it.

The main problem with laptops is most come with less than stellar sound devices. Some come with 24-bit spdif outs but still suffer from noticeable latency which makes live performance difficult at best. There are a good number of external sound devices available for laptops out now but I have yet to see one that has made me confident enough to move away from my road case rack. Plus it looks cool to show up at a gig with a road case full of esoteric lights and whistles.

Now if someone would just write a VST interpreter that will run in Gentoo I will be pooping with joy.

My keyboard rig:
Old ass Kawai K-4 as controller (Per note aftertouch)
P4 3GHz with Delta 1010 for sound device
Tascam TMD-1000 mixer for external effects

oh come on tons of bands do this - KRAFTWERK?!

[lilgorgor]

and practically every other ebm/synth/industrial band. i just saw vnv nation and they had ibooks onstage.

Re:Labtop as an instrument?

[statusbar]

Back in 1986 I wrote the Pro MIDI Player which was a live performance oriented MIDI sequencer. It allowed you to control the sequence in a live sort of way. I originally wrote it because my band was performing at Expo '86 in Vancouver and we needed some parts sequenced but wanted to be able to repeat parts at our whim during the song. It also controlled lights and flashpots via the parallel port via midi messages in the sequence!

It turned into a product for a while. The old atari-st 'typeset' manual is at: http://www.jdkoftinoff.com/main/Historic_Projects/ The_Pro_MIDI_Player/Documentation and the source code is now GPL'd and available at http://www.jdkoftinoff.com/main/Historic_Projects/ The_Pro_MIDI_Player/Source_Code/

I've always wanted to rewrite this for a newer platform but found the market and the music scenes lacking.

--jeffk++