In our epilogue episode, we look at how an engineering professor, Naomi Leonard, is collaborating with dancers to show how birds fly in a flock without bumping into each other; how robots can reflect our humanity back at us; and how other peoples’ rhythmic movements affect our nervous systems. Engineering faculty at Princeton are increasingly working with artists to create an array of projects, and in the process, shining light on how people use, and perceive, the marvels that engineers...

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...

Paul Lansky is the most celebrated and musically influential of the computer musicians at Princeton, and it isn’t only because he was famously sampled by Radiohead on their classic album “Kid A.” His work expanded the boundaries of computer music and speech synthesis for art into territory far from the art’s musically difficult twelve-tone beginnings. In the words of current Princeton Music Professor Dan Trueman, “He invites you to listen however you want… It’s this place you go and your find...

Imagine using a computer to synthesize music, but not being able to hear it as you built it. That's how it was in the 1960s - musicians only heard what they were composing in their mind's ear, until the project, usually riddled with mistakes, was finished and processed at a far-off lab. This presented a challenge to the Princeton interdisciplinary team of engineer Ken Steiglitz and composer Godfrey Winham. They worked to build a device that would translate the ones and zeros generated by the...

When the Computer Center opened along with the Engineering Quadrangle at Princeton in 1962, who knew that the Music Department would be one of its biggest users? The composers were there at all hours, punching their cards and running huge jobs overnight on the room-sized, silent IBM 7090. Working without the ability to hear what they were creating, listening only to the music in their minds, these classical music composers managed to synthesize some of the trippiest music you’ll ever hear. ...

This episode is the story of what happened when a Princeton composer, who was inspired to create some of the most challenging music ever written, decided it could be most reliably performed by a machine. His work to realize that machine led to the birth of the electronic synthesizer as a device upon which one could compose music. And it led, indirectly, to the digital music revolution. The device wasn’t a computer – it was an early analog synthesizer in Manhattan, co-owned by Princeton and...

A revolution in music happened in the Princeton Engineering Quadrangle, but chances are, you don’t know the story. Sixty years ago, some music-loving computer engineers happened upon some musicians who were enamored with a new computer installed on the third floor.  The work they did together helped turn computers – at the time, a hulking, silent machine – into a tool to produce music. Their innovations made it easier to hear that music. That was no mean feat back then. Then they made it...