| Frameworks
for Interactive Sound |
syllabus [archive] |
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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. Listening: Pendulum Music. Various Artists. Reading: Time Scales of Music, Roads, Microsound (handout). For review if necessary: How Digital Audio Works, pp. 8-21 of the MSP Manual (available from Cycling 74 online here). Assignment 1: Select a tool and set up a personal sketch process, including a place online to post your work; email me before the next class 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. 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 down your observations and be prepared to share them in class next week. Also, record a short sample (1-5 seconds) of the close listening, to present in class, and post it in your sketchbook as /1/1.mp3
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Weekly class notes: Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Foundation. See especially Quantum Listening. The MELA Foundation supports LaMonte Young's Dream House. WNYC's Radiolab did a show about Noise and Silence, including John Cage himself recounting his visit to an anechoic chamber and the creation of 4'33".
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| I. w a v e s |
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Oscillations Lecture: Pendulums and springs, basic oscillators, unit generators. Listening: Mark [link] Reading: Chapter One: Musical Sound Perception, and Chapter Two: Acoustic Principles, Hopkin (handout). Assignment 1: Oscillator hunt. Find ways to generate basic repeating waves, ramps, and other forms. 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. Record 8 waves as audio files for your sketchbook. Assignment 2: Get balloons and metal pipes (EMT from hardware stores is good; other things like long metal rulers work as well) to bring to class next week - we'll be building the balloon mounted bar gongs described in the reading. You may work in groups.
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Some spring-mass simulations are available online here, and here (page down). See also hyper-physic's pages on periodic motion.
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Combining Waves Lecture: Additive synthesis - making waves and putting them together; fundamentals, harmonics, and overtones; fourier. Listening: Peter [link] Reading: "Additive Synthesis", pp. 134-144 from chapter 4 of the Computer Music Tutorial, Curtis Roads, 1996 (handout) Assignment: Using only sine waves and additive synthesis, create 8 short sonic sketches (under 5 seconds each). Seek extremes: the harshest possible sound vs. the lushest, etc. Take note of the relationships between frequencies and envelopes used.
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Here's a PDF of a section from the book MPEG Handbook: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 by John Watkinson, explaining the discreet version of the Fourier Transform. To get you thinking about pendulum music, here's an interview with Steve Reich with some of his thoughts on the piece. See also his essay music as a gradual process. For only $1000 you can have an engraving of the original score.
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Modulating Waves Lecture: Ring, Amplitude, and Frequency Modulation (RM, AM, FM) synthesis.
Listening: Spencer Video: Reading: Modulation Synthesis, pp. 213-252 from the Computer Music Tutorial, Curtis Roads, 1996 (handout) Assignment: Create eight or more short sketches using RM, AM and FM synthesis. Use AM or RM synthesis for half the sketches, and FM for the remainder. Be creative in your choice of carriers and modulators - you could use basic oscillators, live microphone input, previously recorded sketches, etc. With FM synthesis, pay particular attention to the ratio between the carrier and modulator frequencies. The synthesis operations can nest - an AM synth algorithm is used for the modulator in an FM algorithm - and feed back - the output of an FM synthesis algorithm could be used to modulate one of the units in the same algorithm (but remember to include a slight delay to avoid an infinite loop).
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The "sonic spot" has a summary of various types of audio synthesis. Dartmouth's Electro-Acoustic Music department has produced an text, previously available online, called Computers and Music. Is the Amen Break the new sine wave? NPR site about the early electronic music of the Barrons. The Telharmonium, from obsolete.com and synthmuseum. The original patent, plus some images culled from the same. |
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Intonation Lecture: Pitches and scales; Just intonation, equal temperament; Partch et al. Listening: Jason Reading: Chapter Three: Tuning Systems and Pitch Layouts from Musical Instrument Design, Bart Hopkin (handout). Assignment: Prepare material for in-class sound generation based on Steve Reich's Pendulum Music. Instead of literally interpreting the score, use the concepts of oscillation and/or feedback in creating interactive material. You should generate sketches documenting your process, but also bring in the patch/application/invention that generates your audio, for playing live in class. Optional/incorporate with above: Invent a scale. Anything is fair game except 12-tone equal temper (ie, the piano, aka what comes out of the mtof object). What is your basic unit? This is typically the octave, but what if you used something else? How many divisions of the unit is in your scale? Are they all equal, or do you use ratios and a fundamental pitch? If so, what are the ratios? Create short audio samples from your scale, either as scale runs or chords (two or more pitches simultaneously). If you wish, you may use pitch-shifted samples from the additive synthesis last week; or you may choose to create or use entirely different sounds.
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The 5th root of 2, by Google. Arnold Dreyblatt works with a carefully conceived just intonation scale. He wrote a paper that discusses his music projects, and has several recordings online. He used to rock this stuff at CBGB's in the 80s. Harry Partch is well known for the tuning system he devised, as well as the instruments (located in New Jersey) he built to play it. The excellent American Mavericks radio series site has some virtual Partch instruments. Some non Partch instruments: balafons and berimbaus. Kyle Gann is a composer using just intonation; see also Pauline Oliveros, Glenn Branca, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Lou Harrison, and Ben Johnston. In fact, there's a whole just intonation network. The Max Magic Microtuner generates Max externals with new tunings (to replace mtof). The Bohlen-Pierce scale uses 13 steps to fill a non-octave (3:1) ratio. This guitar tunes itself. |
| II. n o i s e |
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Noise Hunt In class: Pendulum Musics Reading: The Future of Music: Credo, John Cage, from a lecture in 1937. Reprinted in 1958 in Cage's book Silence (online). Listening: Diane Assignment: Search for noise. Take any short sound (probably in .wav or .aif format, possibly others), 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 .aif) 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. Many edits may have no result, or make your file unplayable - be persistent. Continue incrementally until the source material is unrecognizable. Repeat until you have eight chaotic messes to play in class next week. Enjoy. Note: Please follow this method. There will be plenty of opportunities to make noise lots of other ways; but this way you have little or no idea what you're going to get, which is the point. Examples: |
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Noise Math Lecture: Degrees and kinds of noise; noise from chaotic equations.
Listening: Champion and Diane II Reading: "The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of Art: Listening to Noise," Stan Link, Computer Music Journal, Spring 2001 (online) Assignment: Continue the search for noise, looking for sources in math, nature, machines. What is the sound of a mixer with no input, or a mic in a silent room? A harddrive or a rainstorm? Create or find 8 examples to play in class next week; document where they are from or how they were made.
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Ryoji Ikeda and Dumb Type Wolfram Research on chaos, including the logistic map and henon equations. |
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Filtering Lecture: Filters - removing and reinforcing sounds; subtractive synthesis, vocoders.
Listening: Joe (moved to next week) and Champion Video: Le Chant Harmoniques, Hugo Zemp, 1989 Assignment: Starting with noise or noisy samples, create 4 sketches through filtering and subtractive synthesis. Consider using digital delays or spatial acoustics. What if you alter filter parameters at or near audio rate - a kind of AM/subtractive hybrid? Also: begin thinking about In Class "I am sitting in a room" Reading: None
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The voder was a hand-operated synthetic voice developed in 1939. Mechanical speech machines date as far back as the 1700's. Some sweet vintage speech chips are available online. John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History. Konono, amplified electric percussion music from the Congo. |
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March 14 - 19 |
springbreak
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Particles Lecture: Tiny bits of sound; clouds and streams of those bits; granular synthesis.
Listening: Michael (and Joe - rescheduled) Reading: Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance, sections 3.2.4, 3.2.5 and 4.2.1 (pp. 87 - 98 and pp. 107-108), Golan Levin, 2000 (online, also mirrored here). Assignment: I am sitting... live patches for in-class presentation.
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The original recording of "I am sitting..." as well as an interview with Luicier is documented here. This good idea has been done a lot it seems. The Audiovisual Environment Suite is documented here Nathan Wolek's Granular Toolkit is a collection of Max/MSP externals for granular synthesis. |
| III. s t r u c t u r e |
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Rhythm In class: I am sitting in a room vs. a long thin wire Lecture: Cyclic pulse organization. Listening: David Reading: Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics, Vijay Iyer, 1998. Read the intro of chapter four (from the beginning up to the section beginning "Kinesthetics") and all of chapter five. See also this short paper: "A Spatial Theory of Rhythmic Resolution," Neil McLachlan, Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 10 pp 61-67, 2000. Assignment: Eight sketches on the subject of rhythm. Drawing on the reading and your own personal understanding of rhythm, create sketches in which you explore and express concepts of pulse and pulse subdivision / grouping. You may wish to impose constraints on your sketches, such as making them all the same length, or working only with multiples of three, etc.
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Vijay Iyer's site is here. His interview on Studio 360 is of interest. |
| 11. April 5 | Form Lecture: Structured sounds Listening: Sarit Reading: Arc Diagrams: Visualizing Structure in Strings, Martin Wattenberg, 2000 (online pdf). Assignment: Eight sketches in the form of AB(A). What this means is up to you. Be aware of the attributes of sound you are manipulating and what transformations you apply, and be prepared to speak about that in class next week.
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The Shape of Song applet implements the data structure visualization algorithm outlined in this week's reading. Hosted by turbulence.org; prints available from Bitforms Gallery. Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 Pulitzer-winning book "Godel Escher Bach" is, among other things, an extensive treatment of the perception of form and music. Fingerworks makes interface devices. The LEMUR is a touchpad/visual interface from JazzMutant. NPR's story on Milford Graves and his study of the human heartbeat. Bata drums and Paul Galbraith. |
| 12. April 12 | Strategy/Scores Lecture: Encoding and rendering musical information Listening: Ana Reading: Score of In C, Terry Riley (1964); Scores for Bubblewrap, Digital, and Hammer Anvil Stirrup, Elliott Sharp (1997) (online pdfs) Assignment: Create a compositional strategy text and/or a graphical score; render 4 sketches from your score.
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| 13. April 19 | Improvisation Lecture: Agents of musical interpretation. Listening: Amit Reading: none Assignment: Trade graphical/text scores; prepare material to perform the score live in class next week.
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Check out Steim's Crackle Box, the prototypical circuit bent instrument. |
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Final Class Text/graphical score performance. Thank you. |
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Some 
The previous class versions of pendulum music. The
afternoon class rigged up a number of unusual pendulum mutations;
the evening class deconstructed the idea of feedback with a network
of computers that listened for and responded with different beeps.
The videos show the setup, while the audio documents the final
recital.