McMaster Cybernetic Orchestra delivers innovative performances

Did you know that McMaster University has a live-coding “Cybernetic Orchestra”? Directed by McMaster professor David Ogborn (@Ogborn) and open to students, faculty and employees, the cybernetic orchestra uses laptops to conduct live musical performances. The laptop musicians will use technologies such as gestural interfaces or live coding using the ChucK language to generate sound. The ChucK language is pretty interesting, it has a syntax similar to C code but is compiled to ChucK bytecodes executed by a runtime system. You can actually modify the code while a program is executing, so it really is “live-coding”.

You can follow the Cybernetic Orchestra on Twitter (@CyberOrchestra) or on their blog (esp.mcmaster.ca). Check out an explanation of the Cybernetic Orchestra from David and a performance of the group at a TED Talk in the videos below: