The worlds largest digital “orchestra”
November 18th, 2007 Posted in classical music
Last week the “worlds largest digital orchestra” performed at York university. Apparently this consisted of a 50 students sitting around with MacBooks and waving their hands around a bit. The camera did some gesture recognition and: tada, you have an amplified, probably painfully synthesized, second-rate simulacrum of a real orchestra concert. Yes, I’m a little skeptical.
While the idea of synthesized music is really neat, and kinda appealing to me as a great big geek, the reality (at the moment, anyway) is usually quite painful to anyone who has heard real instruments. It brings back horrible memories of MIDI sequenced “orchestral” melodies. I dunno if it’s still prevalent, but up until fairly recently on Wikipedia several of the sample pieces of music on composer pages were MIDI tracks. Poking around there now seems to indicate this has mostly been discontinued, thank god. I honestly feel it would be better to not have any samples then to have some horrible MIDIesque one.
I’d like to see a video or recording of the event described above, as it sounds intriguing (even if most descriptions are centered on bloody Apples part in the deal) and according to at least one article the concert was streamed live. However the York music department website seems to contain absolutely no information about the event. It seems from what little information I can gather that they were attempting to mimic a real orchestra, as opposed to the other “digital orchestras” (specifically PLOrk and the “Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra“, god what a horrible name) who seem to go for more electronic, computery type music. In principle the idea of replicating the sonic characteristics of physical instruments is fascinating, however I bet a whole bunch of stuff that the reality is still far from perfect.
There’s a lot of information about laptop “orchestras” here.
