I joined SCLOrk (Santa Clara Laptop Orchestra) in the Winter of 2022 as a Computer Science student interested in learning something about electronic music production. At first, I was skeptical thinking it was some sort of student-run club, but quickly found that I stumbled upon a gem. This blog post is for and about SCLOrk.

Brief History: Found by a Brazilian composer and performer Bruno Ruviaro in 2013, the Santa Clara Laptop Orchestra became one of the leading academic electronic music ensembles in the United States, along other notable collectives such as PLOrk (Princeton Laptop Orchestra), SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra), SAMPLE (Portland State University Sonic Arts and Music Production Laptop Ensemble), etc. Following the tradition of PLOrk (founded in 2005), SCLOrk provides performers with a laptop, speaker, and various controllers to produce sound through live coding, sound synthesis, and sensor manipulation techniques. Through collaboration, a multitude of such performers is able to produce all sorts of electronic music, forming an orchestra.

There are a handful of laptop orchestras that exist in the world; they are all a very new practice both in academic music and electronic music as a whole, and most are educational-based orchestras, affiliated with a certain academic institution that supports it and allows for a constant rotation of performing members. SCLOrk has been a crucial part of Santa Clara University Music Department's curriculum since 2013.

The general setup for each player is identical:

Laptop (Dell Vostro 2420, IntelCore i3, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD) running Ubuntu Linux 12.04
USB audio interface (Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6)
Loudspeaker (JBL LSR 2300)
Korg nanoKONTROL
Colorful yoga cushions
Small laptop tables
Cables, cables, cables
Software (SuperCollider)

The amalgamation of these utilities allows a person to produce an infinite kinds of music or noise. However occasionally the need for more tools arise to capture more extraordinary ideas, like:

Microhpones
Wii Remote and Nunchuck controllers
QuNeo 3D pad controller
MIDI controllers,
Signal generators,
etc, the list is endless...

Just like in a regular orchestra, SCLOrk can be divided into sections, or subgroups of performers, each with their own equipment needs (think violins, bassoons). Each player has their own speaker. In a typical electronic music space, we are used to the idea of stereo, or simply having two speakers to project left and right. Since we have many players engaging simultaneously it became apparent that: 1) providing each person with two speakers is practically useless of the difficulty that one would not be able to identify whether the sound is coming from the left or the right speaker of any given player, as there are so many sound sources that are next to each other. 2) Forwarding all signals into a single stereo system is destructive for the performance, it gets harder to navigate who is playing what and to control volume. Spacing players equally around the room with individual speakers solves both of these problems. Everyone is able to hear themselves well due to the proximity of their own speaker and adjust volume dynamically while hearing everyone else perfectly. Positioned in a circle, everyone contributes equally, forming a complex 360-degree soundscape.

All players are connected through a local network of Ethernet cables, not only connecting us to the internet, but to allow players to instantly transfer information to each other, which works in peculiar ways musically.

Another irreplaceable part of SCLOrk is SuperCollider . A sound engine and programming language we use to synthesize sounds, process samples, and communicate with each other. Many software applications have been attempted throughout the many years of SCLOrk, and SuperCollider remains the sole focus for its flexibility and computational interest. Apart from conventional DAW's, SuperCollider is code-based, giving users a low-level framework to sound design. Instead of clicking on a musical note on a visual interface, one would have to type out the physcial frequency of that note into a function that sends that signal to the speaker (a very very very simple representation). It might seem as overcomplicating for no particular reason, but what this framework allows is to think of musical structures as sequences of numbers, giving composition an algorithmic approach. With that in mind, you could do something like automate your function to change the frequency of the note to any random number within a given range every 5 seconds. Now you have some melody going, expanding this idea, imagine modulating ANY parameter of sound - frequency, volume, distortion, reverb, attack speed, decay, multiplying sounds together, bending mathematical shapes, it's kind of beautiful.

Because SuperCollider is open source and low-level, users are also able to append it with custom tools and tweak existing programs to fit specific needs, SCLOrk has been accumulating additions to it’s ever-growing code base that now cocnsits of: a collection of custom-built digital synthesizers, a vast sample library of over 2000 files, a SCLOrkChat interface that is shared between all performers, a list of code chunks that can be instantaneously accessed for a quick demo, and other functionality that ties everything together. If you are interested, check the official GitHub of SCLOrk that stores all that.

What’s great about this setup? Let’s talk about what differs a laptop orchestra from a regular one. Keeping musical time is important. Computers are able to keep time much more accurately than human conductors (with exceptional crushes), every player in SCLOrk is connected through a network to a shared pulse, triggering events simultaneously for all performers. This means that first, players don’t need to physically and consciously be engaged with keeping time at every point in the piece. If you are a violin player, you better know which measure you are on and keep accurate tempo. A laptop player can just trigger code in a somewhat reasonably accurate time span and be confident that every musical event will be perfectly on beat and not need to read it. You can argue that this takes away a very critical aspect of a musician's performance- feeling the rhythm of others and collaborating meaningfully. I would agree, although what this does in practice is removes the necessity of being in time. A SCLOrk player can still keep track, listen, and count to trigger actions perfectly in time just like any other musician, but also it allows to let go of an event when it has been called and shift focus on other things, like controlling the timbre of the sound you produce, or improvising over the line you are playing, or altering the melody dynamically, adding or subtracting while the computer does the time keeping.

Then, using a laptop brings all the novelty of electronic music theory to the grounds of academic orchestral performance. Laptops are able to synthesize all sorts of sound textures, much more alienated ones than the timbres of real acoustic instruments. This is why a great effort of an electronic ensemble is placed on the polishing and crafting of sound shapes prior to the performance. If in a traditional acoustic performance you would listen to how gracefully a cellist plays a melodic fragment, in a laptop orchestra you could be overwhelmed by listening into the intricate details of a single extended note, knowing that it’s formed through a complex layering of overtones and sound waves. You wouldn’t really see a cellist sandpaper their instrument before a performance to slightly alter the way the wooden frame resonates and changes the overall sound, but an electronic musician would totally fiddle with every little parameter to perfect it. Using samples is also somewhat novel to collaborative academic music, changing actual recordings and altering them live to produce rhythmic and melodic structures is a big practice of SCLOrk. Putting electronic music at the forefront changes the way musicians think about composing. This creates meaningful pathways to musically express ideas that were previously impossible.

Live coding has to be a whole separate section here. Live coding is a paradigm where a programmer is writing completely new code live or altering existing code to affect the output of the program that is being executed. In the musical context, this means that one is performing some sort of mental calculation, executes it through code, triggers a musical event, reacts to it, and repeats. Most times, these processes happen immediately or in parallel, a SCLOrk performer can alter the code while it’s running- building on top of previous ideas, jumping from one to another. Putting live computational thinking into music performance is unique to electronic music and opens more variability to how we think about music composition.

Communication is done differently, not only from the orchestra to the audience, but within the orchestra as well. Players are able to talk without ever looking away from their screens or making sounds- through SCLOrkChat. All players can share complex ideas while still performing live. In a typical orchestra, if you want to provide feedback, you would have to stop everyone from what they are doing (like PLAYING duh). In SCLOrk you can share complex ideas, bits of code, and musical data all while performing. This is why improvisation is key to SCLOrk performances, whole sections and even pieces can be completely improvised on stage out of existing ideas and SCLOrkChat communication, and in a way where there are no stitched parts, rests, misunderstandings, in a very fluid and smooth way.

Visual composition is something we are also figuring out. Playing an acoustic instrument is always physical, and for an observer, watching how a musician interacts with their instrument provides vital clues to how the sound is being produced, largely empowering the performance. We see a flutist gracefully swaying side to side and turning to emphasize melodic gestures, drummers aggressively swinging their whole bodies to a rocky groove, a pianist rapidly traversing the length of a keyboard in wide palm stretches - all these things help us hear the music. A laptopist just types, for a lot of the time, staring at the screen, which we cannot see. A laptop is already an instrument that is not primarily associated with music, but with mundane office tasks. One of the challenges of watching a laptop performance is that you never really know if the person is musicking or reading an email. A laptopist can technically pre-record the whole thing, click ‘play’ once, and just sit pretending to do something, How do we fight that? By introducing more physically apparent interactions- knobs, faders, keys, sensors, this brings back the physical component to the player. Dissimilating the performance from what using a laptop typically looks like. SCLOrk intentionally uses no desks and no chairs to remove the office feel. Instead we sit on the floor in yoga like setting, creating an environment that evokes the looks of a Buddhist meditation rather than a worky Zoom meeting. Projections can help by providing visual elements that are directly connected to the sounds made, reinforcing the idea of improvisation and confirming with the listeners' predictions about the processes. For example, in some pieces, a music event can trigger a visual action to happen on the screen.

Visual balance is hard. On one hand, computers are incredibly powerful at visualizing music, projections can happen in sync in real time, and make the performance more fun to watch. At the same time it pulls attention away from the person and the sound, which for SCLOrk remains a priority, as such for an effort to emphasize the superiority of this musical practice and intention, it is more often for a SCLOrk piece to have no visual aid at all. We want people to engage with the music deeply, and by limiting visual distractions, we enable them to do that more easily.

During the pandemic, SCLOrk managed to perform completely online, which might seem like a trivial task for a laptop orchestra- Out of all the ensemble configurations, the one that already uses computers and the internet seem perfect for such a transition; however, SCLOrk has always been about in-person listening and playing. Bringing everything online required more technical solutions to connect the sound together in a way that would minimize signal latency and create a soundscape that is effective for every person involved. All players were able to synchronize digitally and contribute to a single running machine from multiple sources to project music. Just watch this.

Writing new music for SCLOrk is particularly amusing. It is a new instrument and a new ensemble structure; figuring out what to do with it is fun. Through periods of iteration and testing me and Bruno developed a demo SuperCollider tool that emulates a wall of sound typical of a string section. Imagine 10 string players playing a single note, then all of them simultaneously rise to a higher pitch, then a lower one, some of them will be slightly off at different times. To replicate this kind of sound you would need, well, 10 string players, but with a laptop, you can just duplicate your code 10 times and mimic them on your own. With this demo in hand I started writing a visual score for a new piece that we premiered during the 2025 SCLOrk concert. The piece is called ‘Abyssal Popcorn’ and presents a visual score that directs possible movements of players rather than discrete musical events. Each player emulates many different digital string players. Just an example of the possibilities of a laptop orchestra. We can dedicate a good chunk of processing power to a computer to focus on assembling music out of larger ideas. In some way, positioning ourselves onto a higher plane of abstraction.

After years of practice, a new branch of SCLOrk was formed called Chamber SCLOrk. One of the disadvantages of being an education-based ensemble is that there is a learning curve. It takes a reasonable amount of time to get familiar with the setup, the software, the concepts, the musical and technical vocabulary, that by the time a student gets to engage more deeply the course is over. Chamber SCLOrk fixed that problem by scheduling weekly rehearsals for a fixed group of both students and non-students over a long interval of time. Due to constantly being present in the scene, group was able to stay sharp, build a repertoire, and develop ideas that were more conceptually and musically complex. Chamber SCLOrk stopped meeting in 2020 because of COVID and hasn’t been able to reform since.

At the moment, the future of SCLOrk is unknown. Bruno Ruviaro had to leave the United States, and because of the ever-growing technical difficulty of the setup, maintaining the ensemble without his knowledge and guidance becomes practically challenging and useless. It might be time for other electronic music initiatives to fill its place at SCU.

SCLOrk remained active for 12 years from 2013 to 2025.