In most performance situations, the challenge is getting people to turn off all their electronics. In one New York club they're practically required for admission, and in some concert halls they're practically handing them out at the door.

At the easy-to-miss Openair club in Manhattan's East Village, dozens of "laptop artists" gather on Sunday evenings, to jam with each other as well as showcase their individual computer-based compositions.

In a recent New York Times article, a founding member of the weekly "Share" event declared, "It's not far from a traditional music jam where people bring instruments and play together in a band. It's just that the instruments people are using are software and hardware tools."

The participants use various types of music software programs to improvise music together. Other participants are "VJs," computer artists who accompany the music with live, on-the-fly video mixes projected onto screens. The result is a spontaneous, always changing pulse of new music (although when a group starts, "the sound can be jarringly cacophonous because it takes a while for the performers to get in synch with one another.")

Participants pride themselves on the originality of what they produce. One participant declared, "Nobody else, anywhere in the world, has any of these sounds on their hard drives or in their samples. That's what we really go for. We just take a basic wave form and build on it and build on it -- until it's our own."

The founders thought they were forming a club to trade ideas and technical tips, but it turned into a regular musical happening. One regular likes the atmosphere because "even if you're just starting out you can come and play with live musicians. It's important you're not just putting on a track [that] you already know. You're constantly being thrown a curveball."

The Times reports that similar events are emerging in Amsterdam, Berlin and Bordeaux, in the planning stages in Boston and San Francisco.

In July, some concert-goers at the Aspen Music Festival fired up some special handheld computers during Beethoven's Fifth. They were testing the Concert Companion, or "CoCo," a new device that displays program notes in real time, changing every 20 seconds or so during the performance. The device is the brainchild of Roland Valliere, former director of the Kansas City Symphony. He envisioned CoCo as a concert counterpart to the popular audio tour devices that museum-goers have enjoyed for years. According to the New York Times, Valliere has become concerned that "classical music had become an unfamiliar language for contemporary audiences." And as more orchestras struggle to attract new and younger audiences, he figured that the CoCo might be an effective way to connect with people.

Testing is continuing this month with the Philadelphia Orchestra's appearance at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Ultimately, if successful, the CoCo would be made available to concert-goers in the lobbies of numerous symphony halls -- for a few extra dollars, of course.

The devices themselves are off-the-shelf Sony Clie handhelds with special software and wireless connections that pick up notes typed by a musician at the back of the hall. (But not news surfing or stock prices!) Both novice and more musically advanced levels of commentary were available during the Beethoven's Fifth trials. Regarding those legendary first four notes:

Novice: "Separated by two dramatic pauses, the most famous four-note rhythm in Western music catapults Beethoven's hyper-intense Fifth Symphony into action..."

Advanced: "The four-note sequence betrays no key... Only with the torrent it unleashes are we grounded in C minor."

Some critics are skeptical of trying to combine intellectual aspects of music appreciation with the raw, experiential aspects that usually define the concert experience. Others are reminded of the famous P.D.Q. Bach recording, in which Peter Schickele's satirical orchestral outfit provides "play by play" coverage of Beethoven's Fifth as if it were a sports broadcast.

Read the complete New York Times article about laptop jamming [fee required] or an excerpted version in the San Jose Mercury News

Find out more about Share, including live webcasts of their Sunday events

Learn more about the jamming software GDAM, and Live by Ableton

Read about the Concert Companion in the Mercury News or in the New York Times [fee required]

Learn about the Saratoga test of the Concert Companion

Visit P.D.Q. Bach's site and browse his "Wurst" collection, which contains the aforementioned "New Horizons in Music Appreciation."