Michael sez, "Someone has gone to the trouble (I don't know how but would suspect using Melodyne DNA or somesuch) of processing REM's minor-scale downer hit 'Losing My Religion' so that all the minor notes are now major. When I followed the link I thought it'd be a cover, but no, it's the original, processed. It's uncanny - the song is just as familiar as always but the impact is utterly different. Kind of like finding a colour print of a film you'd only known in black and white, or seeing Garfield minus Garfield for the first time. I like it."
Using specially designed and custom made hemispherical speakers and a fleet of laptops, Sideband turns each member of its ensemble in to an island of sound, returning a sense of acoustics and space to the normally flat world of electronic music. Ranging from solos and duos to sextets and beyond, Sideband is an evolving project that inspires composers, performers and audience members to reevaluate the role of computers in music.
Sideband’s parent ensemble, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), was formed in 2005 by Dan Trueman (composer, Norwegian fiddler, and computer music hacker) and Perry Cook (computer scientist, electrical engineer, and music hacker) to be a test-lab for a new way of thinking about electronic and ensemble music. PLOrk has performed widely (in Princeton, New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.), has won a MacArthur Foundation grant, and has worked in collaboration with Zakir Hussain, the American Composers Orchestra, Matmos & So Percussion, and others.
Sideband was conceived out of a desire to explore the PLOrk model of music making in a more sustained fashion, outside the annually changing context of academic classes. Formed in 2008 to premiere a piece with the American Composers Orchestra at Carngie Hall, Sideband is currently made up of a group of long-term members whose skills range from orchestral percussion to installation art, research in machine-learning algorithms, traditional Norwegian folk music, solo performance, electroacoustic music, software design, and scored composition.
Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) founders Perry Cook and Dan Trueman, in pre-concert interviews, explain the philosophy behind their laptop instruments and the on-the-fly computer coding that takes place during performances. PLOrk started as a freshman seminar course at Princeton.
"Most of our students don't know that these things are impossible," says Cook, "and therefore they're not." The PLOrkestra director opening this video is Ge Wang, who received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton in 2008. Wang is the founder ofStanford's MoPhO, a mobile phone orchestra. Wang and Cook also are cofounders of Smule, an iPhone applications company specializing in sonic media.
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 we create? how can we physically control these sounds? how do we compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do we organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?
"The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether," for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All 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. Telephone Game, version 1:
The Wheelharp is a groundbreaking keyboard musical instrument that gives the player the ability to orchestrate a full chromatic scale of sixty-one (61) actual bowed strings at one’s own fingertips, almost like having a real chamber string orchestra at hand.
With an exotic profile and stunning rosette appointments, the Wheelharp’s appearance is equally as breathtaking as its audible character. It is available in a Radial Model (curved keyboard) and a Linear Model (traditional straight keyboard), and in several ranges.
It utilizes a patent-pending action and bridge to translate the player’s subtle fingerings into a range of bowing intensities, and comes equipped with a damper system and electronic pickup system, allowing individuals to sculpt astonishingly beautiful and complex sounds. For musicians, composers, and studios that seek to create the natural sound of classical string instruments while avoiding the frequently sterile quality of digital string synthesizers and samples, or for those looking to foray into new sonic territory, the Wheelharp presents a truly exciting opportunity.
