The computer music movement of the 1960’s, 70s and 80’s created the technology that established the sound of music as we know it today. We unearth the stories behind that movement, as well as some trippy music that demonstrates how music grew into the electronic sounds we take for granted now. In Season 2, we take a deep dive into the music of Stanley Jordan, a jazz master who combines musical virtuosity with a lifelong love of the technology. In Season 1, we told the story of a group of music-loving computer engineers who happened upon some musicians who were enamored with a new IBM computer at the Engineering Quadrangle at Princeton University in 1963.
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The computer music movement of the 1960’s, 70s and 80’s created the technology that established the sound of music as we know it today. We unearth the stories behind that movement, as well as some trippy music that demonstrates how music grew into the electronic sounds we take for granted now. In Season 2, we take a deep dive into the music of Stanley Jordan, a jazz master who combines musical virtuosity with a lifelong love of the technology. In Season 1, we told the story of a group of music-loving computer engineers who happened upon some musicians who were enamored with a new IBM computer at the Engineering Quadrangle at Princeton University in 1963.
Has digital music reached the point of diminishing returns? Has it all been done, and heard, before? At the start of a new millennium, a crew of Princeton engineers and musicians answered this question with a resounding no, building the now-famous Princeton Laptop Orchestra. As a Princeton music grad student in the late 1990s, Dan Trueman worked with his adviser, Perry Cook, on building an unorthodox digital instrument played with all the expression of a fiddle, but sounding more like a robot. And rather than running the sound through a single speaker pointed at the audience, they created a 360-degree ball of speakers, so that the device had the sonic presence of an acoustic instrument. When Trueman returned as a member of the faculty several years later, Trueman and Cook (who had a joint appointment in engineering and music) set their minds to creating an entire ensemble of those unorthodox instruments. And in the process, they created a whole new genre of music and digital creative expression.
Composers & Computers
The computer music movement of the 1960’s, 70s and 80’s created the technology that established the sound of music as we know it today. We unearth the stories behind that movement, as well as some trippy music that demonstrates how music grew into the electronic sounds we take for granted now. In Season 2, we take a deep dive into the music of Stanley Jordan, a jazz master who combines musical virtuosity with a lifelong love of the technology. In Season 1, we told the story of a group of music-loving computer engineers who happened upon some musicians who were enamored with a new IBM computer at the Engineering Quadrangle at Princeton University in 1963.
