[ISEA2011] Workshop: Jason Freeman – Laptop Orchestra, Collaborative Improvisation, and Real-time Music Notation

Workshop Statement

This workshop explores collaborative improvisation within the context of a laptop orchestra, using a simple textual performance environment titled LOLC. Participants will learn to use LOLC to create, manipulate, share, and transform short rhythmic musical gestures based on concrete sounds, and they will rehearse and perform as a laptop ensemble, collectively improvising an exciting musical performance on-the-fly with those gestures and sounds. The workshop will also use LOLC as a platform for exploring real-time music notation: creating, manipulating, sharing, and transforming music notation fragments using the same text-based laptop improvisation techniques. Members of the ensemble will assume the roles of both laptop musicians and instrumental performers, with the instrumentalists sight-reading the notation generated by the laptop musicians as it is rendered on digital displays. This workshop is open to instrumental musicians, computer musicians, composers, and performers. There are no specific prerequisite technical skills. Participants must bring their own laptop computer (either Mac or Windows). We also encourage them to bring their own musical instrument.

  • Jason Freeman‘s work breaks down conventional barriers between composers, performers and listeners, using cutting-edge technology and unconventional notation to turn audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators. His music has been performed by groups such as the American Composers Orchestra and the Rova Saxophone Quartet and featured in the New York Times and on National Public Radio. Freeman studied at Yale University and Columbia University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Music at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, US.