Real-Time Music Notation in Mixed Laptop-Acoustic Ensembles

SGLC is a recent set of extensions to LOLC, a text-based environment for collaborative improvisation for laptop ensembles. SGLC integrates acoustic musicians into the LOLC environment: Laptop musicians author short commands to generate real-time notation, and acoustic musicians sight-read it in performance. We describe the background and motivations of the project, outline the design of LOLC and SGLC, explain the use of SGLC in a musical composition by one of the authors, and evaluate the impact of real-time notation on a concert performance with the environment.