Musical machines - Princeton Alumni Weekly - Princeton University

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tleties that would have been impossible
on tinny pianofortes. “Ludwig,”
writes music historian Roger Neill,
“was Broadwood’s beta tester.”
In the early 1950s, Princeton professors
Milton Babbitt [later *92] and
Roger Sessions helped found the
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music
Center, which sought to innovate
musical composition using reel-to-reel
audiotape, the high tech of the day.
The universities stopped collaborating
in the 1980s, but by then Princeton
had a well-established relationship
with Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J.
Paul Lansky *73, the William Shubael
Conant Professor of Music, remembers
typing punch cards as a graduate
student, converting them to magnetic
tape, and then sending each day’s work
up to Bell Labs for over night processing.
For the rest of the century, a
talented faculty that included Babbitt,
Lansky, Kenneth Steiglitz, Godfrey
Winham ’56 *65, and George Perle
pushed the bounds of theory and continued
to experiment with ways to
harness computers to music.
The current era in Princeton’s program
might be said to date to 1996,
when Perry Cook arrived from Stanford
with a joint appointment in computer
science and music. Cook introduced
new classes such as “Transforming
Reality by Computer” and directed the
Princeton Sound Lab, a research group
run by the two departments, while also
doing his own research in fields ranging
from voice synthesis to designing
computer-music controls. In 2005, he
and Trueman founded PLOrk; three
years later, the MacArthur Foundation
awarded PLOrk a $238,000 grant to
further explore ways to develop networked
computer music.
Many of Cook’s former students
speak of him as a guru, and as befits a
guru he now lives on a mountain. His
house in southern Oregon affords a
view of the Applegate River and a
neighboring vineyard full of champagne
grapes, but the really unusual
sights are inside. Besides a solar-powered
rain stick (an ancient South
American instrument), Cook has built
a 1,200-square-foot state-of-the-art
music studio.
January 16, 2013 Princeton Alumni Weekly • paw.princeton.edu
The walls are not parallel (to
improve the acoustics), and the space is
filled with monitors, control panels,
speakers, amplifiers, and the many
instruments Cook plays, including
acoustic and electric guitars, conch
shells, and an electrified variant of the
aboriginal didgeridoo, which he
cleverly calls a digitaldoo. Imagine
the musical possibilities of another
current project, the Choke-o-phonic
FowlHarmonic, which Cook is codeveloping
with his longtime collaborator,
McGill University music neuropsychologist
Daniel Levitin. It’s a
row of colored rubber chickens with
sensors inside, each wired to produce a
different sound when pulled. Program
them one way and they sound like
snare drums. Program them differently
and they sound like a pipe organ. Or
like chickens.
Cook’s sense of whimsy, Trueman
thinks, may be his greatest contribution
to computer music. The field, he
says, “has sometimes been poisoned by
pretension. [Yet] here is this musical
guy who says we can do these great
things and make this great art, but it
will be fun and we can learn from it at
the same time.”
Kapur, like Wang, credits Cook for
pulling him into computer music.
Born in San Francisco and raised in
Connecticut, Kapur had entered
Princeton planning to study computers,
but by his junior year he knew that
the “computer-science major wasn’t
working for me.” Interested in music,
he took a course with Cook, who
became Kapur’s thesis adviser and also
recruited him as a jazz drummer.
“Perry showed me why I wanted to
learn engineering,” Kapur says. “He
made it fun.” Today, Kapur tries to do
the same with his own students, in
courses ranging from “Introduction to
Programming for Digital Artists” to
seminars blending traditional Indian
and Indonesian music with 21stcentury
technology. Students in
Kapur’s composition class write a 30second
song each week using ChucK
software; in his classroom, illustrating
the odd juxtapositions common in
computer-music programs, large computer
monitors sit alongside hammers
and a power drill. Tammy the robot
and her fellow members of the
Machine Orchestra smile benignly
from hooks on the ceiling.
Kapur believes it is important to
blend computers and art in the
classroom as well as on stage. This
past April, he and Cook received a
three-year, $110,000 grant from the
National Science Foundation to teach
computer science to digital artists. He
and Wang also have received a large
gift from Sony, including a dozen
55-inch computer monitors, to support
a new program at CalArts that they
hope will extend the laptop-orchestra
model of learning to the broader
curriculum.
From the time of Socrates, Kapur
says, the traditional model of education
has been one teacher addressing
many students. Technology, he believes,
can drive a new model in which
instructors and students interact with
and teach each other. In Kapur’s classroom,
the students sit in a large circle
and their large computer monitors face
toward the center, so everyone can see
what everyone else is doing. Whatever
one types instantly is shared with other
members of the class. Creative decision-making,
Kapur has written, “takes
place from doing, experimenting, and
peer learning.”
Apuristmightask if any of this
really is music — or whether laptop
orchestras or individuals blowing into
Ocarinas or tapping on Magic Piano
apps aren’t just playing around with
toys.
“Of course it’s music,” snaps Michael
Pratt, conductor of the University
Orchestra, with just a hint of irritation
in his voice. “Why does it have to come
out of a violin in order to be music? It
would be really weird if people weren’t
using computers to make music.”
Scott Burnham, the Scheide Professor
of Music History, concurs, although he
adds that Cook and others have succeeded
in adding a playful element to
computer music that makes the word
“toy” not completely inapposite. Not
that it matters. “There are many ways
to make music,” Burnham says. “If
music is organized sound, then we’re