The room darkens to the cool glow of LCDs, and mesmerizing patterns pulse in projections on the walls. It’s definitely a gig, but the band is all people with laptops. From colleges to clubs, laptop ensembles and digital jam sessions have proliferated around the globe. In Princeton University’s Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), which meets in a concert hall, students may program code on the spot to produce sound. In Moscow, home-grown soft synths meet with unusual sensors and abstract visuals in the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra. The group has a fitting home: the Theremin Center for Electro-Acoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory, named for the Russian inventor whose designs spawned a century of innovation in electronic sounds. The less formal Share group is the digital equivalent of a drumming circle, and has spread from its origins in a Manhattan bar to a nightclub in Melbourne and an art museum in Geneva.
Exotic as these collectives seem at first, the challenge they face is familiar to anyone gigging with keyboards and other musicians: A good live recording can preserve a lot about what made a gig dynamic, musical, and memorable; a lackluster recording can fail to convey any of this. How do these groups go about it? The answer may surprise you.
ACOUSTIC APPROACHES?
“We never take a stereo mix from a PA mixer. That’s the best way to kill the recording,” says Andrei Smirnov, who directs the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra. “Sometimes, we record individual channels (especially when we perform something that’s composed and structured), but my favorite method is simply to use a stereo microphone. We use individual speakers for each performer and spread laptops out across the stage or performance space. During our cyber jam sessions, the whole acoustic environment becomes an important part of our performance that we really want to keep in our final recording.”
PLOrk takes it a step further, using special speakers to convey a more localized sense of sound to the audience. The hemispherical speakers mimic the way real instruments sound in space, radiating outward in all directions. PLOrk plays live without any sort of main PA mixer. Players achieve balance and space the old-fashioned way — by varying the level of each of their instruments, which just happen to be laptops. Dr. Dan Trueman, co-founder of PLOrk with Dr. Perry Cook, explains how they capture the results: “We do it the way you’d record an orchestra or other large ensemble, with various mic arrays.”
As with the Moscow group, Princeton’s sound makers found live recording religion by trial and error. “We’ve recorded to the internal hard drive in each laptop, cued the record start time over Ethernet, then combined files from all the laptops after the fact,” says Trueman. “It allows for a lot of control, but it’s a lot of work, and doesn’t capture the natural reverb of whatever space you’re in. PLOrk really tries to leverage the acoustic quality of old-fashioned instruments.”
How do they pull this off? Jim Allington, who put together the most recent recording setup for PLOrk’s concerts, explains: “It was important to capture both the spatial interplay between musicians onstage, and the stereo image from the audience’s perspective. I created a Decca-tree type triangle using Schoeps omni pattern microphones at each corner. This was hung off of a reflector 22 feet above the stage, with the mics themselves 10 feet above the musicians. For the audience perspective, I added a near-coincident pair of Schoeps cardioids in ORTF configuration, 10 feet above the stage and 10 feet in front of the ensemble. The triangle records the spatial correlations between each laptop-and-speaker combination, but maintains enough distance to capture their interaction with the hall acoustics. The ORTF pair gets the audience perspective. See “Jargon Jockey”at left for more on these mic techniques.
“All mics feed a Presonus M80 preamp, then are panned hard left, center, and hard right in a TASCAM DM24 mixer, then output in AES/EBU digital format to a DAT and CD recorder at 16-bit, 44.1kHz. All panning is done from an audience left to audience right perspective. We use no EQ or compression in the signal path.”
MULTITRACK MADNESS
Mic arrays work well in concert settings, but what about in a nightclub, the configuration of which performers often won’t know ahead of time? At New York’s Share, the room gets crowded with various musicians jumping in and out of different sets as they balance beers in one hand. In short, it’s chaos.
“We kind of just wing it,” says Anton Marini. Share is an informal meet-up, but a few regulars like Marini help keep it in order. One of his jobs is to record to his older laptop. With everything from circuit-bent toys to hardware and soft synths to include in the mix, flexibility is key. Share’s solution, for ease and consistency, is a standardized template Marini created for Ardour, the open-source DAW for Linux and Mac OS X. (Read our full coverage of Linux musicmaking in the May ’07 issue, and online at www.keyboardmag.com/0507101). Because Ardour is multitrack, there are ample opportunities for manual tweaks to compensate for odd sound levels from different laptops and instruments.
Using a mulitrack DAW is as digital as the recording process gets, though. While many Share groups netcast streaming audio of the overall mix so gatherings around the world can jam in real time, the recording connections at the events themselves are strictly analog. Snakes of cables carry outputs from the audio interface on each performer’s laptop to that of the recording laptop. The point? Even at a gathering of tech-savvy futurists, practicality and reliability trump high-tech tricks. All three groups reported that experiments with networked recording — i.e., using Ethernet and various software applets to transfer audio between computers — generally proved to be too challenging and unreliable, particularly when going across different operating systems.
Though it’s fair to call PLOrk, Share, and the Moscow group experimental and even esoteric, the concept here translates to any amplified performance (such as a typical bar gig) more readily than you might think: Even with recordings of entirely electronic sources, musicians want to capture the acoustic presence of instruments: objects in space, radiating sound from a single location. The other key is to embrace the unpredictable, live element — just the opposite of what you might expect from computers and electronic keyboards.