Wired music: from PLOrk to ChucK and beyond

As part of an hour­long fea­ture on wired art, New Jer­sey Pub­lic Television’s State of the Arts will be broad­cast­ing a piece tonight pro­duced by Eric Schultz on the Prince­ton Lap­top Orches­tra, oth­er­wise known as PLOrk.

The piece was actu­ally recorded last year, shortly after PLOrk gave its world pre­miere per­for­mance, to much acclaim. So what have PLOrk cofounders Perry Cook and Dan True­man been up to in the meantime?

Cook is mak­ing music with a litho­phone orig­i­nally cre­ated with sculp­tor Jonathan Shor for Quark Park. Draw­ing upon his dig­i­tal music exper­tise, he also is research­ing an inex­pen­sive way to screen patients for the risk of hav­ing a stroke and devel­op­ing tech­nolo­gies to help those who suf­fer from aphasia.

True­man has spent the last year as a Guggen­heim fel­low in part work­ing on his Cyclotron, which he describes as a “tool for tweak­ing time” and “a visual inter­face for exper­i­ment­ing with rhyth­mic cycles.” True­man invented his Cyclotron more than a decade ago. But dur­ing his sab­bat­i­cal he decided to fig­ure how to hook it up to ChucK, a new music pro­gram­ming lan­guage writ­ten by Ge Wang, who just fin­ished his Ph.D. under Cook’s super­vi­sion and in the fall will join the Stan­ford Cen­ter for Com­puter Research in Music and Acoustics as an assis­tant professor.

Last year Wang got high praise for ChucK from Lin­den Lab chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer Cory Ondrejka (aka Cory Lin­den), who wrote in his blog that that he was blown away by ChucK when he came to Prince­ton to talk at the invi­ta­tion of Ed Fel­ten about Lin­den Lab’s 3-D vir­tual world Sec­ond Life.

By the way, the Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter at Prince­ton is build­ing a cam­pus on Sec­ond Life. Blog­ger Aleis­ter Kro­nos — who recently got a sneak pre­view and tour from Princeton’s charm­ing vir­tual tour­guide, Per­sis Trilling — describes it on 3pointD, where you can take a peak at Nas­sau Hall’s vir­tual dop­pel­ganger. Just below is the Sec­ond Life ver­sion of Princeton’s Chan­cel­lor Green, where PLOrk gave a fab­u­lous in-the-round per­for­mance last May. Surely PLOrk will be head­lin­ing on Princeton’s Sec­ond Life cam­pus some­time soon.