The Orchestra of Things

Undergraduate #225
Discipline: Computer Sciences and Information Management
Subcategory: Computer Science & Information Systems

Amanda K. Holloman - Albany State University
Co-Author(s): Stephen D. Beck and Jesse T. Allison, Louisiana State University

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The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana (LOLs) was founded in 2008 and wanted to engage undergraduate students without any prior computer experience into the performance of laptop-mediated music. The challenge was to consistently and reliably launch bleeding-edge software with little downtime as possible to create a smooth, seamless performance without long pauses between pieces. Therefore by using the Internet of Things for inspiration, the Orchestra of Things (OoT) was born. In the OoT, all objects (computers, phones, speakers, microphones) are considered things. Things can send or receive control signals. These objects can be ‘meta’ things, containers of other things that pass messages to and from the outside world. The primary focus is to have a method that will collect and disseminate information about OoT-enabled devices in the immediate area, and to launch/quit application on those devices for the purpose of performance. My goal was to improve the networking system by creating the foundation of a server and database that will communicate between the server and the client. Utilizing languages such as JavaScript, SQL and HTML to produce three separate yet intertwined web applications and a database to store the data, a finished product was developed. The homepage houses two links that will allow the user to register to be apart of the orchestra and the other will display the members stored in the database. Further implementations such as a delete user, update users’ information and a non-redundant data refresh features are imperative to the steady improvement to this project. This will allow direct interaction between the client and server’s database with little no interference from staff. To continue improving the communication of the orchestra, it is with high hopes to incorporate both physical Gimbal beacons and virtual ones. These beacons will be imbedded in the website, physical instruments, speakers, and Apple/Android applications in order to include mobile devices such as phones, iPads and tablets.

References: S. D. Beck, C. Branton, E. Berdahl The Orchestra of Things: A New Paradigm for the Management of Ad Hoc Digital Instrument Networks, SEAMUS National Conference, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, February 2015.
Branton, C., Ullmer, B., Wiggins, A., Rogge, L., Setty, N., Beck, S., and Reeser, A. ‘Toward rapid and iterative development of tangible, collaborative, distributed user interfaces.’ Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems (EICS), pages 239-248, 2013.
S. D. Beck, C. Branton, B. Ullmer, S. Jha, S Maddineni ‘Tangible Management Systems for Grid-based Laptop Orchestras’, Proceedings of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2011 International Conference, Oslo, Norway.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award OCI-1560410 with additional support from the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University.

Faculty Advisor: Stephen D. Beck, sdbeck@lsu.edu

Role: The part of this research that I did was creating the codes and getting them to function properly.