))
Episode 5: Laptop Orchestra
Manage episode 330538394 series 3357836
Content provided by Aaron Nathans and Princeton Engineering. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Aaron Nathans and Princeton Engineering or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Has digital music reached the point of diminishing returns? Has it all been done, and heard, before? At the start of a new millennium, a crew of Princeton engineers and musicians answered this question with a resounding no, building the now-famous Princeton Laptop Orchestra. As a Princeton music grad student in the late 1990s, Dan Trueman worked with his adviser, Perry Cook, on building an unorthodox digital instrument played with all the expression of a fiddle, but sounding more like a robot. And rather than running the sound through a single speaker pointed at the audience, they created a 360-degree ball of speakers, so that the device had the sonic presence of an acoustic instrument. When Trueman returned as a member of the faculty several years later, Trueman and Cook (who had a joint appointment in engineering and music) set their minds to creating an entire ensemble of those unorthodox instruments. And in the process, they created a whole new genre of music and digital creative expression.
12 episodes
Share
