Laptop Orchestra: A new genre of music
By KEOSHA JOHNSON
Observer Staff
Nov. 15, 2007
Photos by Nathalie Laville and Janine Cooper and Slideshow by Andras Gal
Click the image to start the slide show. Click here to view at full size.
The future of music is here. Forget Guitar Hero, now you can make real music with your…laptop?
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra, also known as PLOrk, has taken music to new technological heights. PLOrk co-founders Perry Cook and Dan Trueman, two professors at Princeton University, merged their computer science, engineering and music savvy backgrounds to create music on laptops. Using tilt sensors on the bottom of the laptops–usually used to protect a computer’s hardware if the machine falls–PLOrk members slowly tilt their Macs in time to the conductor’s instructions. According to Cook, six-channel speakers are connected to each laptop, giving each PLOrk player “the physicality of an instrument” by making each player responsible for his or her own sound, instead of all the sounds coming out of one speaker. All of this creates a New Age sound that leaves you feeling like you woke up in the 22nd century.
Cook put it best when he said, “Our genre is laptop orchestra, which is a limited genre. It doesn’t appear on iTunes yet.”
Video by Nathalie Laville
Click the image to start the slide show.
PLOrk is the first orchestra of its kind in the United States. But being just three years old, it’s already gaining popularity at other schools around the country. Former PLOrk member Ge Wang, who helped instruct the first PLOrk class at Princeton, is creating a course at Stanford University.Wang created a computer audio programming language called CHUCK.“It’s a language for synthesizing sound and making music, and now more recently, analyzing sound,” said Wang. PLOrk members use CHUCK to create instrumental sounds during live performances with a simple click of the mouse, tap on the keyboard or tilt of the laptop. CHUCK can be downloaded for free on Princeton University’s Website, http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/.
According to Wang, PLOrk members consist of everyone from the computer science graduate student to the curious history major.
“The only true commonality between all the PLOrk students is this intense drive about making music with computers,” said Wang.
As if the music weren’t unique enough, PLOrk members play on the floor, sitting on mats and bean pillows.
“I believe it was decided that having chairs and desks would make it look too much like a classroom or an office, and suggest certain uses of the computer that we really want to get away from here,” said Rebecca Fiebrink, a PLOrk member who is completing a doctorate degree in computer science at Princeton University.
“This is a creative ensemble, it’s a music-making ensemble, and the laptop is just a tool, the same that a flute or a piano is a tool,” she said.
Audience members at a recent PLOrk performance at the National Academy of Science in Washington seemed impressed with the show.
“I’m not at all a technology person, but I like music, so this was so interesting for me to see. I mean, some of it was just like, how are they doing that?” said Nayantara Watsa.
But Watsa couldn’t say how PLOrk used computers to create a symphony. “I still don’t know, but I think that’s what I like about it,” said Watsa.
With PLOrk continuing to spread awareness of the musical capabilities of laptops, the future of music education may soon be in the hands of music teachers and computer science professors alike.
