PLOrk CMJ

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra: Motivations, Design, Music

Authors: 1. Trueman 2. Cook 3. Smallwood 4. Wang

outline:

• 1. introduction and motivations [dt will start]
  • a. more on musical motivations, notions of intimacy, dislocation, stuff from BoSSA etc....
• 2. design
  • a. like the ICMC paper, but somewhat more in depth [skot, dt will start, using ICMC]
  • b. hardware
  • c. software
  • d. networking
• 3. compositional approaches and issues [dt will introduce, others contribute to subsections as you see fit]
  • a. networking and the conductor
    • i. approaches
      • 1. traditional
      • 2. text messages
      • 3. linked lists and trees (PLOrk Tree and Chuck Chuck Rocket)
      • 4. time syncing
      • 5. dance (tomie)
      • 6. gaming models
        • a. skot’s pieces
        • b. Chuck Chuck Rocket, and PLOrk Tree sorta....
  • b. interfacing
    • i. QWERTY and CliX
    • ii. sensors
    • iii. off-the-shelf
    • iv. to hold the laptop or not to hold the laptop
  • c. sounds
    • i. live signal processing
      • 1. PLahara and PLOrk Chorale
      • 2. Pauline and the audio network
    • ii. sampling and sound files
      • 1. crb/tomie
      • 2. Non-specific....
    • iii. synthesis
      • 1. Paul’s piece
      • 2. the PLOrk Drones
  • 4. plork problems and lessons [start with ICMC stuff, rewrite and expand]
    • a. like ICMC
    • b. defensive measures
      • i. decimate data
        • 1. send major beats compute subdivisions locally
        • 2. decimate gestural data from conductor and smooth locally to decimation level
      • ii. transmit complete state of patch at low bandwidth
        • 1. ignore locally if any aspect of the message is unchanged from last transmittal
      • iii. redundant roles of players (if one goes down...)
  • 5. PLOrk pedagogy [ge will start]
  • 6. conclusions and discussion
    • a. compositional challenges
    • b. things that were exciting
    • c. things that are annoying
    • d. theatrical and social issues
      • i. interesting to watch?
        • 1. video, in future
        • 2. making the instruments more challenging and (likely) more interesting to watch
        • 3. how important
      • ii. sound and social context with large group