Introductions/Overview - scope and purpose of the class; coursework and assignments; who are you?

Lecture: Fundamentals of acoustic, electronic and digital audio; Different time scales.
Tool overview and selection: Max/MSP, pd, cSound, portAudio.

Listening: Steve Reich, Pendulum Music. Version 1 by Sonic Youth, from Goodbye 20th Century; Version 2 by Ensemble Avantgarde.

Reading: How Digital Audio Works, from the MSP Manual; Time Scales of Music, Roads, Microsound.

Assignment 1: Select a tool and set up a personal sketch process, including a place online to post your work; email me to notify me of what you choose and the location of your sketchbook.

Assignment 2: Careful listening. Step 1 - listen far. Listen first to sounds near you, then proceed outward to the edge of your perception, attempting to hear sounds from as far away as possible. Write down your observations. Step 2 - listen close. Find a repeatable sound, like footsteps, a keystroke on a keyboard, etc. Listen as closely as possible to this sound, attempting to perceive the sound not as a singular sonic "icon" but as a complex phenomenon with many components. Write two short paragraphs describing your observations.

Waves

Demonstration: Reich's Pendulum Music

Lecture: Pendulums and springs, basic oscillators, unit generators. Remember highschool trig?

Demos from class

Listening: The Reich-John McEntire connection. Selections by Michael Sharon: Bridge, Amon Tobin, from Permutation; and Building Steam with a Grain of Salt, DJ Shadow, from Endtroducing.

Reading: Chapter One: Musical Sound Perception, and Chapter Two: Acoustic Principles, Hopkin (handout); Music as a Gradual Process, Reich (online)

Assignment 1: Find the basic generators in your tool. In Max/MSP, this includes (but is not limited to!) the cycle~ and phasor~ objects; in cSound these are oscil, etc. Explore - slow them down, speed them up, take them to infra- and ultrasonic realms. Watch numbers change; understand phase, radians, etc. The purpose here is to start interfacing with your tool; sketching proper will begin next week. Post a representative file (patch, score, etc) showing your work, but don't worry about generating sound this week.

Assignment 2: Make one of the simple instruments - ballon-mounted bar gong or fork chime - to bring to class next week. People may work in groups.

Combining Waves

Demonstration: Listening to the simple instruments from the Hopkin reading.

Lecture: Making waves and adding them together; Fundamentals, partials and harmonics; Pitches and scales; interpolation.

Max demos from class. I've included text versions of patches to facilitate opening across platforms and maybe even Pd. Also, here's some cSound examples from the cSound Book.

Video: Magic Music of the Telharmonium, Reynold Weidenaar

Listening: Selections from Eric Socolofsky: Greenways Trajectory, Squarepusher, from Go Plastic, and Ah One, Two, Three, Cut,
The Invizibl Skratch Piklz, from The Shiggar Fraggar Show!

Reading: Chapter Three: Tuning Systems and Pitch Layouts, Hopkin (handout); Additive Synthesis, Roads (handout).

Assignment: Create 5 to 10 different short (.1 to 10 seconds long) sounds by adding sine waves together. Post your sounds in mp3 format in your sketchbook, along with text clearly explaining the following: 1) the number of waves used; 2) the pitch relationships (ratios) between the waves; and 3) how the amplitude of waves is changed over time. We will listen to work in the next class. Extra credit: model your additive synthesis work directly from the simple instruments created last week.

Intonation

Lecture: More on pitches and scales; Just intonation, equal temperament; Partch and Dreyblatt.

Max demo from class.

Listening: Selections from Olivier: The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky, conducted by Pierre Boulez; and Kasena, from Ghana: Music of the Northern Tribes.

Reading: The Language of Ratios and Basic Monophonic Concepts, from Genesis of a Music, Harry Partch, 1949 (handout); OR Beginings, Theories, Histories, Arnold Dreyblatt, 1998 (online).

Assignment: Building on the previous two weeks, create 5 new, longer (still under 10 seconds) soundfiles. You may literally cut and paste the sounds you created last week for this assignment, or generate new tones using additive synthesis. Referencing the theories of intonation that we are reading about, as well as the concept of process music, create structured snippets of sound. Consider employing one type of oscillation to trigger another. Think vertically (harmony) and/or horizontally (scale/melody). Consider the upper and lower reaches of the audible frequency spectrum. Each sample you create should be exactly the same length.

Arnold Dreyblatt's main site is here.

Brian Eno on generative music.

A page with many java applets illustrating concepts in tuning.

Information on the Bolhen-Pierce scale, which is not based on the octave.

Modulating Waves

Lecture: Ring, Amplitude, and Frequency Modulation (RM, AM, FM) synthesis.

Max demo of RM, AM and FM synthesis.

Listening: Selections from Manlio: Rainsquall, by Richard Buckner, from bloomed.

Reading: Modulation Synthesis, pp. 213 - 236, from the Computer Music Tutorial, Curtis Roads (handout); Timeline of electronic musical instruments, Roads (from Microsounds) and obsolete.com (handout, online).

Assignment: Explore AM, RM, and FM synthesis. Build your own patches so that you really grasp the methods involved. Be creative in finding your carriers and modulators; for example, these could be the output of one of your (or your classmates') previous patches. Then create the following (10 sounds total), and post them as mp3s in your sketchbook:

• 2 sounds under .25 seconds using AM or RM synthesis, and 2 using FM synthesis.
• 2 sounds between .25 and 2 second using AM or RM synthesis, and 2 using FM synthesis.
• 1 sound over 5 seconds long with AM or RM synthesis, and 1 using FM synthesis.

Include notes about the methods used.

Listen to these samples from Karlheinz Stockhausen mentioned in the Roads reading:
from Kontakte (1960)
from Hymnen (1967)

Stockhausen made the news when he reportedly equated September 11th a great work of art.

Some information on Jaques Dudon, who uses light to make sound.

Instruments

Lecture: Instrument classification and methods of transduction.

Video: Maywadenki, courtesy of Uriko.

Listening: Selections from Marc (postponed to next week).

Reading: Browse through the physics website.

Midterm Assignment: Research one of the instruments listed in Road's timeline or obsolete.com from last week's reading. (You may also research something not listed if it is in a similar category.) Find material covering both the particulars of the object's creation - who made it, and where, when, why, etc. - and how it functions. Prepare a 10-minute presentation about the device to give to the class. Second, create a sonic work that either 1) recreates the sound of the device or some aspect of it, through a software reconstruction of its mechanism, or 2) is evocative of the sound of the device. Put another way, your sound work could be a rational experiment that attempts to improve your understanding of the object you are researching, or an intuitive composition that communicates the tone, mood, or essence of the object. Note: If you choose the second (evocative) method, you must use samples from your classmate's previous work for the class (although you need not use them exclusively). Integrate the sound work with your presentation.

You may work alone or in groups.

No Theremins.

Physical modeling overview

Lecture: Physical models of instruments

Max demo of synthesis from first principles.

Video: Theremin - an Electronic Odyssey

Listening: Selections from Marc (whales) and Zhenya (space man)

Reading: None

Assignment: Work on the midterm.

Midterm presentations

Assignment: Search for noise. Take any short sound (in .wav or .aif format), and open it in a text editor such as BBEdit. You will see more or less garbage. Leaving aside the first hundred characters or so (which contain header information about the file) edit the file in any way you see fit. Cut and paste sections from one place to another. Rearrange lines. Reverse or sort sections of text. Munge it with a perl script. Paste in an email. After each edit, save the file as a new .aif (or whatever) file and - after turning down the volume - audition it. Repeat: turn down the volume. The edited file is almost always much louder than the source. Some edits will have more interesting results than others. Some edits may have no result, or make your file unplayable. Continue incrementally until the source material is unrecognizable. Repeat until you have five noisy chaotic messes to play in class next week. Enjoy.

Examples: bass sound: original, modified1, modified2
random sines: orignial, modified

Noise

Lecture: Degrees and kinds of noise.

Examples and patches from class.

Listening: Selections from Matt and Joon (postponed to 10.4)

Reading: The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise, Stan Link, Computer Music Journal, 2001 (handout).

Assignment: Continue the search for noise. Find more equations or systems that generate noise. Implement chaotic equations. Find sources of noise in nature. Prepare five examples to play in class next week; document how they were generated.

Filtering and Subtractive Synthesis

Listening: Selections from Christine, Matt and Joon.

Video: Le Chant Harmonique

Assignment: Next week we will implement and realize Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" in class. As a class, organize and prepare for this. Read the score. By Friday, email me with a list of equipment you would like to have at your disposal. Come to class prepared to implement a patch that can realize the piece in real time. Bonus for multilingual students: translate the text of the score into another language - the version we implement will have as many languages as possible in it.

Filtering continued

Listening: Selections from Koichi.

In class: Execute "I am Sitting in a Room"

Assignment: Post final manifestos to the wiki.

Sound as particles (delayed by fire)

Lecture: Granular synthesis.

Example patches

Listening: Selections from Phil.

In class: Finish "I am Sitting in a Room."

Reading: "On the Perception of Meter" from Vijay Iyer's dissertation, Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics (online)
                or
A Spatial Theory of Rythmic Resolution, Neil McLachlan, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 10, 2000, pp. 61 - 67

Final Review

Listening: Selections from Taku, Daniel and Phil