By Lauren Wyman, Special to The Packet
Most orchestra rehearsals feature violinists sitting straight-backed in chairs, percussionists looking for cues from the conductor and flutists waiting with fingers at the ready. At the weekly rehearsals for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, however, you’re more likely to see people hitting, banging and shaking their computers.
”You can take a function that the laptop already has like the shake sensor and manipulate that function to produce a sound,” said Simon Krauss, a Princeton senior. “You can make a sound out of any input you provide.”
Krauss is one of 13 members of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) who shake, rattle and tilt their computers to create a symphony of electronic sound.
Describing the music that emanates from the laptops is almost impossible: think of “The Jetsons,” think of “Star Trek,” think of “Star Wars,” and then forget about them. Electronic music is more akin to the sounds that issue from your computer when you accidentally press a button than to the futuristic sounds depicted by popular culture.
Yet this user-error type sound was exactly what Princeton music professor Dan Trueman and Princeton computer science professor Perry Cook had in mind when they formed PLOrk in 2005. They wanted to explore ways in which human choice and human mistakes (like accidentally hitting a computer key) could be integrated into computer music capabilities. And so they did and the idea quickly caught on.
Since PLOrk’s debut concert in spring 2006, the idea of a laptop orchestra has expanded to universities across the nation, from Stanford to Carnegie Mellon, and to cities across the world, from Oslo to Bangkok.
Krauss explained that the electronic music fills a yet untapped niche in the music world.
”If people want traditional music, it’s silly to use synthesized sound. A violin sound is better on the violin than on a computer,” said Krauss. “But in electronic music, people are playing with timing here and randomness that traditional music cannot do. It fits a different opening in the musical world.”
However, John Morris, another Princeton senior in the orchestra, said that he would never leave a concert humming the tunes.
”I don’t find many of the pieces to be aesthetically appealing,” he said. “Sometimes I leave a concert with my ears ringing.”
Following the philosophy of Trueman and Cook, current PLOrk directors Dan Iglesia and Jeff Snyder said the point of the orchestra is not to make music sound aesthetically appealing it’s about doing something “stylistically computer-y” with the combination of computers and humans, said Iglesia.
”The sound is a trace of a conceptual idea,” Iglesia said, “not the work itself.”
Iglesia and Snyder continued to explain that the pieces often explore new ways to integrate humans into computerized music, and that’s what makes them exciting.
For example, Snyder wrote one such piece, called “Whac-a-Note.” To produce sound, orchestra members would use a joystick to guide a 3-D hexagon into a honey-comb type projected onto a screen. If the user successfully landed the hexagon into the honeycomb, the correct note was played. If not, random noise was produced.
”Electronic music is really about making a song fun to play and interesting to listen to,” said Snyder. “Whether interesting is aesthetically appealing in the sense of traditional music, I don’t know.”
Like Krauss, Snyder and Iglesia do not believe that electronic music will replace traditional music in the modern music world.
”When the electronic music synthesizer was made in the 1950s, there was a big commotion in the music world about how all musicians will lose their jobs,” Snyder said. “That didn’t happen, and we don’t think that will happen today.”
”Until robots take over and demand that everybody listens to it, I don’t think that it will enter the mainstream,” Snyder continued.
While they don’t believe that electronic music will become the music of choice for middle school dances and high school proms, Iglesia and Snyder agree that electronic music is intricately connected to popular music. The directors point to artists like Bjork, Lady Gaga and Radiohead.
”These artists took technologies that started in the esoteric electronic music world,” said Iglesia.
For orchestra members such as Karis Schneider, a sophomore at the university, the opportunity to explore this new frontier of music is exciting.
”How often do you get to change music you listen to and make it sound better?” she asked.

