I recently played a very unique show. It was a performance of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Penelope featuring Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and the incredible chamber ensemble Signal. There were about 25 of us crowding the stage at Brooklyn’s Bell House.

   Hi!!! Can you find meee??

At this particular show, I was playing laptop. Sarah (the composer) and I have been working on sound design for Penelope for several months, but we’ve been thinking of things almost exclusively in terms of how they will sound on the studio album, not how they will be performed live. So we’ve created tons of little sonic events, ambient soundscapes, and rhythmic textures, but almost none of it is “performable.” Additionally, neither the performers nor the conductor had heard the sound design before our one-and-only rehearsal. Oh, and playing to a click was not an option.

So this wasn’t the typical, “hit play on the iPod and let the band jam along to a backing track” situation. In fact, it was just the opposite. The sound design was incidental, to be performed fluidly on top of the very human orchestra (though not too human, thanks to conductor Brad Lubman’s incredible sense of time).

There are several obvious problems here: How is the laptop to stay synchronized with the ensemble? How can important sonic events happen when they need to? How many parameters and effects need to be performed live in order for the sounds to blend with the orchestra?

I wanted to create a notation system – a performance protocol – that would address these issues while using minimal equipment (laptop plus a single control surface – M-AUDIO Trigger Finger). So for each song, I created a custom score which could be placed on the Trigger Finger. Here is a picture of the set of finished scores:

   Finished Scores for Penelope

And one closeup:

   Score for “Circe”

Each score consists of a grid of squares that correspond to the pads on the Trigger Finger. Cues are given inside each square as measure numbers or lyrics. When a pad is struck, a sample is launched in Ableton Live. I chose Ableton for a few reasons. For one, I had done the brunt of the sound design for Penelope in Ableton so it made sense to keep things there. Also, I wanted to be able to take advantage of Ableton’s “warp” feature which allowed me to tap along with the live ensemble and have my samples stretched to fit the live tempo. This was incredibly useful for songs where rhythm was key. In other songs, tempo mattered hardly at all and samples could be played without warping. I also made heavy use of Ableton’s crossfade capabilities to ensure smooth transitions between clips.

Here’s a screenshot of the Live set:

   Master Ableton Live Set

As you can see, each “group” of tracks represents a song. Between songs, I would solo the next group of tracks in the set. The scores tell me the initial tempo of the song so that warped clips will be played back at a reasonable tempo if tapping to reset the tempo has not occurred. So the setup between songs is minimal: solo the track and set the initial tempo. The scores also tell which sliders control the current sample’s volume and to which crossfade group each sample belongs (A or B). I found this to be an extremely intuitive way of performing. A lot of the time when I have performed laptop in the past, I get overwhelmed trying to remember where all my samples are and which knobs do what. But I found this method to be a happy medium between having too much (sample overload) and too little to do (“hit play and go”). It was also quite thrilling to be able to play along with a real live ensemble without forcing them to follow the laptop. I almost felt just like another member of the orchestra! (If you discount the giant headphones and the ubiquitous luminescent laptop glow on my face.)

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