Real-Time Music Notation, Collaborative Improvisation, and Laptop Ensembles

This paper describes recent extensions to LOLC, a text-based environment for collaborative improvisation for laptop ensembles, which integrate acoustic instrumental musicians into the environment. Laptop musicians author short commands to create, transform, and share pre-composed musical fragments, and the resulting notation is digitally displayed, in real time, to instrumental musicians to sight-read in performance. The paper describes the background and motivations of the project, outlines the design of the original LOLC environment and describes its new real-time notation components in detail, and explains the use of these new components in a musical composition, SGLC, by one of the authors.