Researchers at the Princeton computer science department’s Soundlab have won the 2006 International Computer Music Conference Distinguished Paper Award.

The paper is based on the Ph.D. work of graduate student Ananya Misra. Her coauthors on the paper are graduate student Ge Wang and Perry Cook, professor of computer science and head of the Soundlab.

The researchers will receive the award, sponsored by the Journal of New Music Research, at the International Computer Music Association‘s annual conference in New Orleans in November. The researchers also will present their winning paper, “Musical Tapestry: Re-Composing Natural Sounds,” at the conference. Misra, Wang and Cook are co-creators of a digital sound editor called TAPESTREA (Techniques And Paradigms for Expressive Synthesis, Transformation, and Rendering of Environmental Audio).

Misra received an undergraduate degree in computer science from Bryn Mawr College. She is a fourth-year graduate student in computer science.

Wang is the inventor of ChucK, a programming language that allows musicians to improvise digital scores on the fly. He received his undergraduate degree in computer science in 2000 from Duke University. He will receive his Ph.D. in computer science this year from Princeton.

Cook, who holds a joint appointment in music, is co-creator of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and the author of numerous papers on the physics of sound synthesis, the history of music and technology, and the digital manipulation of sound. Cook earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1991 from Stanford University and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2003.