This summer, computer science professor Bill Manaris, music professor Yiorgos Vassilandonakis and students are building on the Laptop Orchestra that performed in 2010. Watch a video of the Laptop Orchestra.
Manaris and computer science students Dana Hughes and Kenneth Hanson are developing software for creating many different types of computer music instruments. These instruments will have modern graphical user interfaces, which will increase usability. Vassilandonakis will use the instruments to compose and perform musical pieces.
“It takes years to master playing a guitar or violin, but these computer-based musical instruments will be much easier for beginners to play,” Manaris says. “We do not want to replace traditional instruments, our goal is to engage more people in musical performance. Plus, they offer versatility. They can be used by a single performer or by multiple performers in ensembles, like in a Laptop or iPad orchestra. There is also the opportunity for a mixture of traditional instruments and computer instruments.”
These musical instruments will be customizable to particular compositions or musical styles and may be used to perform music at impromptu musical happenings (such as at a party or a coffee shop), or be part of a formally-composed, avant-garde orchestral piece.
This project, partially funded by the National Science Foundation and Google, is conducted in the context of the computing in the arts (CITA) major, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the School of the Arts. CITA combines creativity, problem solving, and computational thinking through an interdisciplinary curriculum of courses offered by computer science, music, art history, studio art, and theatre and four synthesis courses.
Manaris and Vassilandonakis have worked on other projects together, including Monterey Mirror, a new interactive music performance system with artificial intelligence capabilities. The Monterey Mirror is an electronic music generator, powered by computer programming, which mirrors a human performer and can participate as an equal in a live performance. Watch a video.
In 2009, Manaris and several of his students developed a hybrid internet radio / music discovery platform called Armonique (http://www.armonique.org). Unlike other music discovery systems such as Pandora, Armonique identifies aesthetic similarities from over 250 statistical patterns in the music. These patterns are based on Pythagorean principles of harmonic proportion. Watch a video.
For more information, contact Bill Manaris at manarisb@cofc.edu or Yiogros Vassilandonakis at vassilandonakisy@cofc.edu.
