thurs april 28 | 8:00 pm

$24 | $10 students/seniors | eyego

Princeton Laptop Orchestra with Andrew Stewart

Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts
36 King Street West

Presented in association with NUMUS

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is an ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers.

At Princeton, they have been exploring ways in which the computer can be integrated into conventional music-making contexts (chamber ensembles, jam sessions, etc...) while also radically transforming those contexts. This has involved developing new speaker systems that have a more instrument-like presence, human-computer interfacing designs that involve performers physically the way musical instruments do, and software to link the performer's bodies to sound. Each laptopist performs with a laptop and custom designed hemispherical speaker that emulates the way traditional orchestral instruments cast their sound in space.

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?

In their short existence, PLOrk has performed with the likes of Zakir Hussain, Pauline Oliveros, Matmos, So Percussion and the American Composers Orchestra.

Andrew Stewart 's compositional activities centre on contemporary art music and composing instrumental music, musique concrète, acousmatique musique, music with live electronics and for innovative digital musical instruments. Andrew's compositional projects of the last fifteen years attest to his interest in blending acoustic instrument and electronic music composition. His current research centres on the application of new technology both in the context of the classroom and the concert hall.

The digital musical instrument called the “t-stick” “grew out of a collaborative project undertaken by Joseph Malloch and composer D. Andrew Stewart The t-sticks have been designed and constructed to allow a large variety of unique interaction techniques such as: touching, gripping, brushing, tapping, shaking, squeezing, jabbing, swinging, tilting, rolling, and twisting. As a result, a significant emphasis is placed on the gestural vocabulary required to manipulate and manoeuvre the instrument. The musical experience for both the performer and audience is intensified by a unique engagement between performer body and instrument.

WITH WINDS for soprano t-stick from D. Andrew STEWART on Vimeo.