PRINCETON — The Princeton Laptop Orchestra is one of 17 winners of the Digital Media and Learning Competition, which awards funds to projects that use digital media in an innovative way for formal and informal learning.
The contest, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, awarded $238,000 to the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk for short) to support a mobile musical laboratory that students will use to explore new ways of making music with laptops and local area networks.
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra, an ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments, grew out of a Princeton University freshman seminar taught in 2005 by Perry Cook, a professor with joint appointments in computer science and music, and Dan Trueman, an assistant professor of music. The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers and software developers, exploring ways in which the computer can be integrated into conventional music-making contexts — such as chamber ensembles or jam sessions — while radically transforming those contexts.
The competition is part of the MacArthur Foundation’s five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative, designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. The winning projects were selected from 1,010 applications.
To create a mobile musical laboratory, students will collaborate to design new technologies and learn about a variety of subjects, including musical acoustics, networking, instrument design, human-computer interfacing, procedural programming, signal processing and musical aesthetics. One of the project’s aims is to enable students to make electronic music not just in rehearsal rooms, but from anywhere on campus.
"The MacArthur grant will allow us to completely reinvent the PLOrk technology to make it much more portable and easy to use, highly significant changes that will directly impact the way we teach our courses and the way students use the technologies," Trueman said. "Indeed, the history of musical instruments shows us that the music we imagine is inextricably linked to the instruments we make it with, so it is hard to overstate how important this redesign might be for us."
Currently, each "instrument" consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker and a variety of control devices, such as keyboards, graphics tablets and sensors. The set is heavy and awkward to carry.
