[Af_List] Fwd: Networked Music Review Commission: "The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether" by PLOrk

[Luke Duncalfe]

On Wed, 07 May 2008 17:35:09 GMT, turbulence at turbulence.org said:
> May 7, 2008
> Networked Music Review Commission: "The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether"
> by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk)
> http://turbulence.org/works/plork
> 
> "The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether" is an exploration of a real-time
> collaborative composition local network. All of the performers have
> identical performance/composition programs -- a custom flexible
> step-sequencer -- that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various
> lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin
> spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their
> ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge,
> like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning
> unrecognizable to their creators.
> 
> BIOGRAPHY
> 
> The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of
> computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a
> laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control
> devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc.). The students who
> make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and
> software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can
> they create?; how can they physically control these sounds?; how do they
> compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical
> and technical ramifications: how do they organize a dozen players in this
> context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?
> 
> In its first year of PLOrk's existence, composers and performers from
> Princeton and elsewhere developed new pieces for this unprecedented
> ensemble, including Paul Lansky (Professor of Music at Princeton), Brad
> Garton (Director of the Columbia Computer Music Center), PLOrk
> co-founders Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, and several graduate students.
> They have made extensive use of a new music programming language created
> by Princeton graduate student (now assistant professor at Stanford
> University|CCRMA) Ge Wang, called ChucK, which allows the performers to
> develop new code in performance. In their first major performance (April
> 2006, Richardson Auditorium) we were joined by the renowned tabla
> virtuoso Zakir Hussain, legendary accordianist and composer Pauline
> Oliveros, and the exciting young percussion quartet from New York City,
> So Percussion. PLOrk was featured in the April issues of the MIT Press
> Technology Review and Wired Magazine, and performed at the Dartmouth
> College "Orche!
>  stras of Sameness" festival in May 2006.
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