Laptop orchestras are electroacoustic ensembles of digital instruments such as laptops, tablets, smartphones, and various controllers, often enriched by analog modular synthesizers, DIY circuitry, or other electric or electronic devices used to generate or process sound. These orchestras constitute a diverse global performance practice that relies on improvisation to evolve-both locally in each ensemble and globally as an art form. Laptop orchestras engage with varying artistic, social, and technological media that are alocal in nature-that do not necessarily manifest identifiable cultural traits associated with the ensembles' localities or their members' cultural origins. While a complex web of cultural, geographical, and social influences clearly affects the training, perceptual habits, and creative, improvisational practices of these orchestras, such influences are too varied and rapidly changing to be isolated or traced. While some argue that the history of laptop orchestra performance is rooted in Western traditions (see Jeff Albert, "Improvisation as Tool and Intention"), its perceptual alocality and technological bases are better understood as the product of global, social performance networks. From the untraceable, alocal multilocality of laptop orchestras a dynamic, evolving improvisatory musical culture has emerged. Improvisation has always been at the heart of the laptop ensemble. Many performances include novel logistical settings and collaborative forms, technologies, and sonic structures. An emphasis on new instrument design and a shared drive to innovate has opened the way for many new modes of improvisation, including with DIY interfaces (Arduino open-source software, for instance), through processing-rather than generating-sound, and with loopbased material, among many others. Navigating these unchartered territories demands rapid, creative responses to emergent possibilities and challenges.In this essay, I argue that laptop orchestra practices-due to their tradition-defying, multidimensional, hybridic nature at the cultural, stylistic, geographical, personal, social, and technological levels-should be approached as a culture of related behaviours and beliefs rather than as a genre. I focus on how non-idiomatic improvisation serves as a crucial local and global evolutionary force within laptop orchestra culture by breaking with old patterns to discover new expressive possibilities, by creating new sui generis patterns, and by developing skills that radically expand improvisatory strategies. Laptop ensembles transform their creative output, modes of interaction and perception, and technology by exploring new settings, problems, and solutions.

This paper reports a study that sought to discover the necessary aural skills for composing, performing, and understanding electroacoustic (EA) music and the extent of their teachability by traditional aural training according to an analysis of a mixed-method (qualitative/quantitative) questionnaire completed by a purposive sample of 15 experts in the field of electroacoustics. The participants evaluated a list of 50 potentially necessary aural skills, which were gathered from skills described in existing, but insufficiently applied, aural training systems and theoretical methods related to aural perception in EA, and provided additional skills they found necessary for EA. The survey revealed that the aural skills deemed the most necessary for EA by the participants were not regarded as sufficiently teachable by traditional aural training and the majority of the skills considered teachable by traditional aural training were not thought of as significantly necessary for the EA musician. Moreover, among the 50 skills listed in the questionnaire 56 per cent were deemed at least very necessary by the participants, with only 18 per cent of them viewed as sufficiently teachable by traditional aural training. The main implication of this study is a pressing need for further development, research, and experimental testing of aural training methods for EA.

Inner Ear is a browser-based aural training software designed to improve and better understand the process and means through which students acquire sound-focused aural skills. Its ongoing development follows educational principles established through years of research with undergraduate music students who major in electroacoustic studies, beginning in 2005. It provides users with ongoing detailed feedback about their performance, areas that need additional work, and an accessible notepad for students to record their insights during practice. It collects data on users’ performance and settings that can later be analysed and shared with their instructor. The design of Inner Ear follows insights that emerged in students’ feedback, provided mostly in home practice reports. Primary among these insights are the needs for individualizable practice environments, diversified exercises, speedy and informative feedback and progress evaluation methods.

The purpose of this study is to explore effective strategies for successful collective improvisation in laptop orchestras. Collective music-making requires listening to and interacting with others in order to create a cohesive performance. However, musical expression also involves a sense of agency (Maus 1991; Levinson 2004), which may be perceived most prominently when individuals take temporary creative leadership roles and intentionally destabilize the sense of cohesion, either to rejuvenate it or to catalyze change. In my experience teaching and directing the Concordia Laptop Orchestra (CLOrk), I have observed that orchestra members learn to be attentive to stabilization and cohesion and to apply those concepts to their music-making relatively quickly, but that they have more difficulty learning and applying destabilization and catalysis techniques. Through interviews and questionnaires with CLOrk members, I have learned that the obstacles to taking destabilizing actions while improvising may be technical (primarily monitoring challenges), personal (ego depletion and attentional limits), and/or social (risks of peer rejection, exclusion, and shame). CLOrk members proposed strategies to address these challenges, including (1) arranging the orchestra in subgroups to improve audio monitoring coherence and to reduce attentional load and (2) communicating regularly about all relevant matters, including emotional and social obstacles in order to promote a mindful environment of sharing and a safe space for trial and error in the creative process.

The global live coding ensemble SuperContinent proposes a live-streamed collective live coding performance for NIME, using the Estuary browser-based, collaborative live coding platform. Our improvised performance would last 10-15 minutes, would feature