Digital orchestra wins MacArthur funding

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) has received an Innovation Award totaling $238,000 from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition.

Co-founded by music professor Daniel Trueman GS ’99 and computer science professor Perry Cook in 2005, PLOrk is a musical performance group of 15 laptop-based instruments.

The award money will allow the currently technologically limited PLOrk to become more portable, stylish and harmonious, Trueman said. PLOrk was one of 17 competition winners, chosen from 1,010 applicants.

“The 17 winners represent some of the best thinking from many disciplines and professions working to harness the power of the web for learning,” MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton said in a statement.

“Musical instruments are amazing, seductive technological objects, and our aim is to make digital musical instruments inspire the way acoustic instruments do,” Trueman said in an e-mail.

“As it stands now, the PLOrk ‘stations’ are quite heavy and awkward to carry around; no-one would ever want to haul one around campus to their dorm room,” Trueman said. “One of the aims of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra is to enable students (and professionals!) to make electronic music anywhere, anytime.”

“We’ve been working with the same basic technological setup since the orchestra started,” PLOrk co-director Seth Cluett GS said. “Now that we know what it is capable of, we can adapt and modernize the technology.”

The MacArthur funding will pay for the development of new, more portable hemispherical speakers as well as improvements in the use of local wireless networks carrying time-sensitive musical information.

“Networking is one aspect of making music jointly with laptops that really is without precedent,” Trueman said. “In addition to listening, we can share information — beats, melodies, text messages, meta-data, whatever — over the network and collaboratively compose and perform.”

The grant will also encourage new techniques for interacting with a computer in musical ways, whether using existing technology like a Wii remote or new designs built at Princeton.

“Within this new highly mobile and robust real-time laboratory, we aim to teach and discover new ways of making music that rely on digital networking,” Trueman and Cook said in their project proposal.

PLOrk is a particularly “brilliant” idea because it provides a way for students of any musical background to create music, music department chair Scott Burnham said.

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“We’ve had everyone from Ph.D.s to freshman seminars working with the program,” Burnham said. “It’s a superb pedagogical tool.

PLOrk is also a unique way to teach computer science because students become inspired when they hear the results of their coding, Cluett said.

The computer equipment, however, was expensive to set up and is costly to maintain, Burnham said.“[PLOrk] is a terrific enterprise, and it’s expensive,” Burnham explained. “This grant will really help [Trueman] continue to develop it.”

The Innovation Award is part of MacArthur’s initiative to determine how technology affects the current generation in all aspects of life. This year’s winners will receive developmental and educational support as well as funding. Though Cook and Trueman entered the competition together, MacArthur has an editorial policy that only one investigator is listed per grant, and thus Trueman is the official recipient.

Students in MUS/COS 314: Computer and Electronic Music through Programming, Performance, and Composition and MUS 316: Computer and Electronic Music Composition are the performers in PLOrk this semester.