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Are you ready for an exciting and innovative challenge? The Spring 2025 L2ork Tweeter Hackathon is just around the corner, and we want YOU to be a part of it! Whether you’re a student from Virginia Tech, a regional university, or anywhere in between, this is your chance to showcase your creativity, compete for amazing prizes, and collaborate with students from across the country and beyond! 

There is no need to have previous knowledge or experience with the L2Ork Tweeter,

Everyone is welcome! 

Register here!

What is the L2ork Tweeter Hackathon?

The L2ork Tweeter Hackathon is a two-day event in which students from various universities collaborate to create music using the L2Ork Tweeter, a cutting-edge musical tool. Participants will have the opportunity to push the boundaries of sound and technology while competing for incredible prizes.

Prizes & Sponsors

We are thrilled to announce that our prizes are sponsored by some of the biggest names in the music tech industry! Here’s a peek at the sponsors backing this event:

  • Ableton
  • Cycling ’74
  • Renoise
  • D4
  • DeltaSoundsLab

These prizes are sure to make your musical projects even more rewarding!

How Can You Participate?

Whether you’re based on Virginia Tech’s campus or beyond, we have options for you:

  • In-Person Participation: If you’re nearby, we invite you to join us at Virginia Tech for the full event experience! We have funding to bring participants from the region, including travel, lodging, and food.
  • Online Participation: Not in the area? No problem! You can still compete and join the fun virtually from anywhere.

   

Important Dates & Registration

The clock is ticking! You have until Friday, March 7th, to register for the event. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to be a part of something truly innovative.

How to Register:

  • Visit the event website for more details about the hackathon and to get started with the registration form.

Event Website
Registration Form

We can’t wait to see what you create at the Spring 2025 L2ork Tweeter Hackathon. Join us and be a part of this exciting event that connects students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines!

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Interstellar premiere

A couple weeks ago L2Ork International Ensemble premiered a new work commissioned by the City of Alexandria (VA) Office of the Arts. The ensuing work seeks inspiration from StudoKCA’s Interstellar Influencer (Make an Impact) installation that was on display for the past year at the Alexandria’s Waterfront Park. Featuring performers over 5,000 miles apart, the work tells a story of the asteroid whose impact shaped the Chesapeake Bay 35 million years ago. The premiere once again engages Virginia Tech’s visual artist Thomas Tucker who assisted with the projection mapping element. Check out the video of the event below.

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Upcoming Premiere

Coming up on Saturday, October 19th, 2024 @ 8p ET in the Old Town Alexandria VA Waterfront Park, a premiere of a new work commissioned by the City of Alexandria VA Office of the Arts, featuring the L2Ork International Ensemble featuring projection mapping by Thomas Tucker. Come experience a telematic music co-creation of the latest EDM-style work by the artist thousands of miles apart!

Learn more at:
https://www.alexandriava.gov/public-art/project/site-see-interstellar-influencer-make-an-impact

L2Ork International Ensemble Premiere of a New Work in Alexandria VA Waterfront Park

#L2Ork #L2OrkTweeter #PdL2Ork

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Hello L2Orkers!

🎶✨ Gala here! I want to share some exciting news with you all. We’ve been performing quite a lot recently, and being a part of the Laptop Orchestra is getting better and better! 🎵💻

We now have 3 new videos on our YouTube channel: two from NYCEMF and one from the ICAD conference. You can check them out below:

🎥 8-bit Petal @ NYCEMF 2024: Watch now

🎥 Territorio Prismatico @ NYCEMF 2024: Watch now

🎥 8-bit Petal and Territorio Prismatico @ ICAD 2024: Watch now

I hope you guys enjoy our latest pieces, Territorio Prismatico and 8-Bit Pedal. We’re now starting to compose our next piece, so… stay tuned! 🎶✨

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After years of development, the Pd-L2Ork developer community is thrilled to announce immediate availability of the WebPdL2Ork open BETA that is capable of running just about any patch created using Pd-L2Ork inside a browser. Simply upload your patch to a Web-accessible location and point your browser to http://pd-l2ork.music.vt.edu:3000?url=<URL-to-your-patch>

All related subpatches and abstractions will be accessible as long as they are in the path. The main patch will be stretched across the browser window. Subpatches may be visible as floating windows as long as their location has been saved within the box of the original patch. Some adjustments may be necessary to the subpatch locations, or they can be even embedded as graph-on-parent-enabled subpatches on the main patch window.

To test out patches already hosted on our page, please use links provided below. Select patches also have hidden shortcuts. For optimal experience, we recommend Google Chrome or Chromium.

VT Waves Project Learning Modules:

  • Autotune (explore how an Adelle solo refrain would sound if sung on a single note;)
  • Distortion (experiment with clipping an audio signal to create a guitar-like distortion)
  • Phase Cancellation (learn how to cancel vocals from just about any mainstream pop tune by subtracting the right channel from the left with an inverted phase, use Shift+(1-3) to enable different sources)
  • Pitch Relationships (explore frequency and pitch relationships; use Shift+A to enable pitch/frequency ratio viewer, and Shift+S to open spectrogram subpatch)
  • Spectral Filtering (the iconic Forbidden Planet and FFT-based vocal filtering)
  • Spectral Filtering Harmonics (explore decomposition and reconstruction of human voice into 10 sine tones; use keys ~ and 1-0 to toggle individual overtones, use Shift+(2-3) to enable other potential sound sources, toggle off a source to “pause” the signal, use Shift+4 to toggle slider that cross-fades betwen the original signal and reconstructed one)

And, if you have a beefy computer, you can also run the entire L2Ork Tweeter inside the browser (currently networking is not supported, so only the offline mode is available). Once loaded, consider opening one of the included saved sessions using the top-right corner session loading option by typing “grapevine-end” (without quotes) inside the “SESSION NAME” text box, pressing enter, and then clicking on the green “LOAD” button positioned immediately to the left of the text box. Please be patient with the loading process, as this is a CPU intensive patch (the pd-l2ork patch itself is in excess of 5MB). Once the session is loaded, it may take up to 10 seconds for the audio engine to catch-up before the audio dropouts stop. If dropouts do not stop, or if loading takes much longer, chances are your CPU is not fast enough to handle the patch running inside the browser (you can always explore the desktop version which is considerably less CPU intensive). Use Shift+(F1-F12) to take control of individual parts. For more info on L2Ork Tweeter, including tutorial videos, visit our Tweeter page.

What does not work: Gem library, networking objects (they load but do not work due to sandboxed nature of a web browser) and a few select (and not commonly used) 3rd-party libraries are not yet supported. Everything else should work out-of-box.

To learn how to build your own HTTPS-enabled web server: Visit the pd-l2ork github and read the emscripten/DOCUMENTATION.md file.

This project is sponsored by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research under ONR award number N00014-22-1-2164. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.

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