Bringing Communities Together Through Music
Welcome to Virginia Tech Linux Laptop Orchestra’s L2Ork Tweeter. L2Ork Tweeter is a free and open source program inspired by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic that has required a vast majority of the human population to practice prolonged social distancing. It is designed to bring communities together by empowering users around the world to engage in collaborative music making even over slow internet connections. It also facilitates the exploration of audio synthesis and the rich variety of sounds one can generate using the frequency modulation algorithm. It supports up to ten concurrent performers and as many additional guests or audience members as the server bandwidth allows who can observe a performance live over the internet. Each user is given an instrument with a tracker that can be populated by up to 64 loop-enabled keystrokes or notes. This intentional constraint requires users to build complexity through interaction with other users. It is in part inspired by the popular social media platform Twitter that imposes a similar design constraint of allowing only up to 280 characters per Tweet. As a result, and as evidenced by its name, L2Ork Tweeter can be seen as a musical counterpart to Twitter.
Below we cover essential steps to get you started as quickly as possible. For a detailed overview of Tweeter’s features, we encourage you to watch the video above. For a 2-minute quick-start, fast-forward the video to the 1:25 mark. You may also want to check out “Into the Abyss”, the first ever crowdsourced work written for the L2Ork Tweeter platform and premiered live online on December 8th, 2020, as part of the fall 2020 Creative Technologies in Music/C+I/ICAT event, or jump directly to the online synchronized “drop” found near the time marker 03:23.
Getting Started
First, you will need to download and install the Pd-L2Ork) free and open-source digital sound manipulation visual programming language.
Download latest Purr-Data test release for:
- Pd-L2Ork for Linux (Ubuntu 20.04), OSX, and Windows (version 0.42 and newer requires Pd-L2Ork 2.16 or newer)
Once you have installed the Pd-L2Ork. Download the latest version of the L2Ork Tweeter using the following link:
Download Latest Version of the L2Ork Tweeter (v.0.42)
Now, simply unzip the downloaded L2Ork Tweeter zip file and open the L2Ork-Tweeter.pd file found inside it by double-clicking on it and you should be all ready to go.
Mastering Tweeter
For information on where to go from here, consider watching the video linked above. Should you have any questions or encounter any problems, you can find us on the l2ork-dev mailing list.
We very much look forward to the creations you may come up with while collaborating with other users from across the world. Please don’t forget to share your creations with us and we will gladly include them in the future releases of the L2Ork Tweeter. Until then, stay safe, stay creative!