Looping Meditations

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by Jason Riggs

while(true) {




In the laptop orchestra, it can often be difficult to hear what you are doing, what your neighbors are doing, and to discern the relationship between the two.

This piece seeks to provide an exercise for learning to listen closely to your own sound as well as to what purpose it serves within the greater context of the orchestra.

The piece can be performed as an exercise during rehearsal. If it sounds musically coherent, it can be performed live as well.

It's called Looping Meditations and consists of a live-looping GUI.

Setup Instructions

In the early stages, it would be wise to limit the piece to 6 (or fewer) players. It would probably be best to arrange the stations in a circle at first.

Two separate files are to be run in the miniAudicle: low-looper.ck, high-looper.ck. Also, there is one short sound file, “bells.aiff”. Make sure the miniAudicle directory is set to the location of the file, and that the file path code at the top of the .ck file is set up accordingly.

Players should randomly select one of the two chuck files, low-looper or high-looper.

Warm-up Exercise

For a small warm-up exercise, try pairing together with a single neighbor. One chooses the low file, the other chooses the high file. Try to sound good together as quickly as possible. Find ways to communicate.


The conductor cues the players to add a single shred simultaneously.

If you are playing, you must: 1. Use your ears to try and locate the members of your musical group (low/high) 2. Together, set loop points and adjust pitch/reverb to cohere musically within your group rhythmically and tonally. 3. Finally, with your group, try to make yourselves sound good with the other group.

When the full orchestra has reached a point that sounds musically coherent (maybe), collectively raise the master volume, and then fade out slowly together.


There are three files, two chuck files and the sound file used in both.

Here are the chuck files, one high-pitched, one low-pitched:

high pitched

low pitched

Here is the sound file:

sound file