Waggle Dance relies on two sets of sounds: firstly feedback between each laptop's built-in mike and its speakers, and secondly intimate texts written and recorded by the member of the orchestra. Only the edges of these sounds, however, are heard as each laptop runs a program that, like a nervous conversationalist in the principal's office, makes noise through a awkwardly belated attempt to self-edit (this process emulates a venerable analog signal processing device known as a "Ducker".) Every time a computer starts to say something, it shuts itself up, but always a moment too late. The cat is never let out of the bag, but we can hear its whiskers twitching.

2 guys. 1 room. No sleep.

Our favorite childhood game gone terribly wrong.

"For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind lived without a straight line in nature. Objects in this world resonated with each other. For the caveman, the mountain Greek, the Indian hunter (indeed, even for the latter-day Manchu Chinese), the world was multicentered and reverberating. It was gyroscopic. Life was like being inside a sphere, 360 degrees without margins...Here we have a clue to the mentality of the pre-literate, that world of oral tradition that we eventually left behind about the end of the Hellenic period. It is the mentality of the multitude, or as Yeats put it: everything happening at once, in a state of constant flux."

- Marshall McLuhan "Visual and Acoustic Space" from Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music

On-the-fly programming, or live coding, is the practice of writing code in real-time to create music. This piece is our first attempt at large-scale, group live coding (15 humans/laptops) to create a single sound world. Players, divided into squadrons, follow instructions from a conducting live coder, who issues directives both in the form of code fragments (in the ChucK language) and sentence fragments (in the English language). In keeping with the crucial live coding tenet of revealing the process to the audience, the conducting machine will be projected 1) for all to observe and 2) as a means of instructing the ensemble.

Players begin with a simple code template (in the miniAudicle environment), which they modify over the course of the performance to create and sculpt sound. Operations include code modifications, adding code (+) to be rendered into sound, or replacing existing code (=) with updates. "Rally points" are set throughout the template to coordinate group coding bombardments. The piece alternates between detailed code changes and sections in which players are encouraged to improvise. In on-the-fly programming, the code is the instrument; and it is played via the act of programming. Also, we never really know what's going to happen next (expect glorious disasters). Until itŐs performed, the piece remains TBA to all, including us...

Favorite Things began its life two years ago as a laptop quartet and was modified this year to fit the wonderful pentadecatet known as PLOrk. This piece uses samples of people talking about their favorite things (joyfulness ensues). Using a custom software interface, players improvise on the samples. The players are split into two groups (left and right), that, as the piece unfolds, merge into one (joyfulness ensues). The graphical display is created live algorithmically and is controlled by the conducting computer. Joyfulness ensues.