IFAC Control Orchestra

The IFAC Control Orchestra is an orchestra ensemble consisting only of musicians from the automatic control community. After a virtual performance at the 21^st IFAC World Congress 2020, we had our first performance live on stage in Yokohama, Japan, at the 22^nd IFAC World Congress 2023 (see below).

We additionally plan to organize further performances of the IFAC Control Orchestra in the future, in particular at the 23^rd IFAC World Congress 2026 in Busan, Republic of Korea. For this, we are constantly looking for interested people from the automatic control community who have some previous musical experience and who are interested in being part of this highly dynamic, distributed, nonlinear, adaptive, fuzzy, MIMO, fault-tolerant, learning-based feedback control system with experimental verification and validation. If this tickles your fancy and you would like to be informed about the next steps, please send us an e-mail to control-orchestra@ist.uni-stuttgart.de

Performance at the 22^nd IFAC World Congress 2023 in Yokohama, Japan

For the 22^nd IFAC World Congress 2023 in Yokohama, Japan, 33 musicians from overall 13 countries joined to deliver the first live performance of the IFAC Control Orchestra. Jochen Rieber, the conductor of the IFAC Control Orchestra wrote tailored arrangements which were distributed to the musicians roughly six weeks before the World Congress. Two 90-minute rehearsals took place during the World Congress on Monday and Wednesday after the technical sessions.

On Friday, three pieces were performed on-stage at the closing ceremony in front of an estimated audience of 2000 attendees: the festive ballad “You Raise Me Up“ by Norwegian composer Rolf Lovland, the fast-paced modern pop song “Blinding Lights“ by Canadian singer The Weeknd, and the well-known rock classic “Don't stop believin'“ by the American band Journey. With a lot of passion and energy, the orchestra performed their first live concert and was met by enthusiastic applause from the audience.

We thank the following musicians for contributing to this performance:

Local organization: Tetsuo Shiotsuki (Tokyo Denki University), Takashi Yamaguchi (Ricoh Ltd), Masaki Nagahara (Hiroshima University), Masahiro Mae (University of Tokyo)

International organization: Julian Berberich (University of Stuttgart)

Musical arrangements and conductor: Jochen Rieber (DHBW Ravensburg)

Performance at the 21^st IFAC World Congress 2020 in Berlin, Germany

The 21^st IFAC World Congress 2020 featured the first performance ever by the IFAC Control Orchestra. In this unique event, a virtual orchestra performance was presented including only musicians from the automatic control community.

More precisely, the Grand Opening Ceremony of the World Congress included a performance of "For a lifetime", based on "Ein Leben lang" by the Swiss group Fäaschtbänkler. Furthermore, the Closing Ceremony featured a performance of "Smoke on the water", based on the original song by Deep Purple. Both songs were conducted by Jochen M. Rieber.

We thank the following musicians for contributing to this performance:

Organization:

Jochen M. Rieber, Airbus Defence and Space, Friedrichshafen, Germany
(arranger, conductor, audio/video engineering)

Julian Berberich, University of Stuttgart, Germany
(organization, audio/video engineering)