Making magic with musical Macbooks

Just when you thought you could do some pretty cool things on your laptop, think again: members of PLOrk can make an orchestra out of their Macbooks, through a unique set of speakers and the music-specific programming language known as ChucK, and hit all the right notes — all while making sure their software doesn’t glitch out in the middle of a performance.

Otherwise known as the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, PLOrk was founded by associate music professor Dan Trueman and the now-retired Perry Cook in 2005 and has developed into a national phenomenon. The first of its kind, PLOrk has inspired the formation of laptop orchestras across the world, from Stanford to Bangkok. The group has also been featured in The New York Times and has played in Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra. Trueman said of the experience of playing with tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain: “It was terrifying. He said, ‘I wanna play with you guys. I wanna try that.’ It was a disaster in rehearsal, but he wanted to come back and play with us again, so we kept at it, and he played our first concert with us in Richardson, and it actually went great.”

Perhaps one of the most intriguing things about PLOrk is the mystery of how you can make an orchestra out of laptops. “That’s a question we try to answer with every piece of ours,” says Rebecca Fiebrink, the current co-director of PLOrk and an assistant professor of computer science. “It might be analogous to a conventional instrument in that every time the student makes a physical gesture a sound is triggered, and the way that person makes the gesture changes the nature of the sound, such as key strokes and mouse clicks, and for a lot of pieces we use the motion sensor that’s built into the laptop.”

Among the fascinating array of electronic instruments PLOrk has programmed into its orchestra is a gadget that Trueman refers to as the “tether,” a two-stringed game controller for a simulation golf game that looks like it belongs more to an Xbox than a musical ensemble. The sight of PLOrk performers pulling at the strings in the tethers almost looks like some kind of new and bizarre workout, and indeed the students appear to work up a sweat as they rise and stand in the process of making music with the tether.

The orchestra uses hemispherical speakers that project sound in all directions, invented by Trueman and Cook and now used by most laptop orchestras around the country. “Because there is localized sound, like with a real orchestra, everywhere you sit in the hall is going to sound a little different,” music major Christina Hummel ’13 said. “It’s almost like a video game. You have this environment in a video game, but every time you play it, your game will always turn out differently even though you’re navigating the same location. Computer music is similar in that every time it’s performed it’s performed differently.”

“One of the pieces we did last year was a choose-your-own-adventure type of thing, where we said we’ll start here and then it will branch off. It’s completely different from anything else I’ve ever played with,” Hummel said of her experience with PLOrk.

PLOrk’s music has an ethereal quality, partly due to the conductor who stands in front of the orchestra wearing an iPad attached to his shirt, which signals to the students which bar they should be playing. However, this is not always the scenario in a PLOrk performance. “Sometimes the conductor is actually a computer that’s sending a pulse out to the other computers over the Wi-Fi network, so the performers don’t have to worry about keeping time. Sometimes performers send text messages to each other,” Fiebrink said.

So how does one become part of this unique ensemble? It turns out that PLOrk is a computer science course with an application. “For our midterm projects, our assignment was to write a three-to-five minute piece,” Avneesh Sarwate ’14 explained. “Music experience is definitely good, but I’m not a trained musician; I just picked up guitar. PLOrk has all different levels of programming experience, and it was cool to see how creative everyone is. People who only just started learning programming in that class came up with all this crazy stuff I would have never thought of.”

What’s one of the toughest things about being in PLOrk? “For a lot of the rehearsals, we’ll be running through the piece, and the software just, like, breaks. That’s a huge extra stress added on to a normal ensemble rehearsal,” Sarwate said.

PLOrk has its annual performance this Saturday, April 7. The group returns to Richardson Auditorium for the first time after three years, joined by Cook.