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.

Audio and patch from class.

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

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

Oscillations

Listening:

Afternoon: Liubo, Joe
Evening: Ahmi

Lecture: Pendulums and springs, basic oscillators, unit generators.

Director demo from class.

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.

Combining Waves

Lecture: Additive synthesis - making waves and putting them together; fundamentals, harmonics, and overtones; fourier.

Max/MSP demo from class; audio samples 1 and 2

Listening:

Afternoon: Jamie
Evening: Jared

Video: "Magic Music of the Telharmonium", Reynold Weidenaar, 1998. (rescheduled for next week)

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.

Intonation

Lecture: Pitches and scales; Just intonation, equal temperament; Partch et al.

Max/MSP equal temper and just intonation demos from class. The examples used the plucked~ string simulation from the Percolate toolkit.

Listening:

Afternoon: Mark (rescheduled for next week)
Evening: Derek

Reading: Chapter Three: Tuning Systems and Pitch Layouts from Musical Instrument Design, Bart Hopkin (handout); Electric and Electronic Musical Instrument Timelines, from Microsound by Curtis Roads and www.obsolete.com

Assignment: Invent two scales. 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.

The "sonic spot" has a summary of various types of audio synthesis.

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.

Goldenratio.com is not a good source of information on the golden ratio. Goldennumber.net is better.

This guitar tunes itself.

Modulating Waves

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

AM and FM patches from class. Also includes the Soundflower audio driver for OSX and Dan Palkowski's transcription of a David Zicarelli feedback FM patch presented at ITP last semester.

Listening:

Afternoon: John, Mark
Evening: Daniel

Reading: Sections 4.5 - Introduction to Modulation and 4.7 - Frequency Modulation, from Computers and Music (online).

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).

Dartmouth's Electro-Acoustic Music department has produced an online text called Computers and Music that will serve as our text this week; the whole book looks like a promising source for further info. It uses JSyn for its interactive demos.

In FM synthesis, the ratio between the frequencies of the carrier and modulator are significant; here's a discussion.

For the demos this week I found Amadeus II's realtime spectrum analysis plus Soundflower's inter-application audio routing to be a great combination.

Jack might be a robust alternative to Soundflower, and the name is better. AudioXplorer looks like a good audio visualization suite.

There are tutorials on digital music here; they include basic and advanced FM synthesis.

High-quality text-to-speech in a few languages is available from ATT; this was used for the .wav files in this week's example download.

Noise Hunt

In class: Pendulum Musics

Listening:

Afternoon: Morgan
Evening: Doron

Reading: The Future of Music: Credo, John Cage, from a lecture in 1937. Reprinted in 1958 in Cage's book Silence (online).

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:
quiet bass sound: original, modified1, modified2
random sines: orignial, modified
french: original, twelve edits later

Noise Math

Lecture: Degrees and kinds of noise; noise from chaotic equations.

Demos from class: random, random walk, the logistic map (bifurcation diagram) and the henon equations.

Listening:

Afternoon: Elliot
Evening: Guillermo

Reading: TOHU BOHU: Considerations on the nature of noise, in 78 fragments, Guy-Marc Hinant, Leonardo Music Journal vol. 13, 2003 (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.

Filtering

Lecture: Filters - removing and reinforcing sounds; subtractive synthesis, vocoders.

Examples from class: manual low pass filter, delay-line comb filter, vocoder.

Video: Le Chant Harmoniques, Hugo Zemp, 1989

Listening:

Afternoon: Ashleigh
Evening: MJ

Reading: none

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?

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.

Particles

Lecture: Tiny bits of sound; clouds and streams of those bits; granular synthesis.

Examples from class.

Listening:

Afternoon: Akio
Evening: Brian

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: Using only tiny fragments of sound (between 1 and 100 ms in length), create eight short sketches using granular synthesis techniques. Also post a file documenting individual representative grains used in your sketches.

Rhythm

Lecture: Cyclic pulse organization.

Listening:

Afternoon: Luis
Evening: Ephrat

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.

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.

Form

Lecture: Structured sounds

Listening:

Afternoon: Matt
Evening: Desireena, Teresa

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.

Strategy/Scores

Lecture: Encoding and rendering musical information

Listening:

Afternoon: Steve
Evening: Yoonhee

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 OR a graphical score; render 4 sketches from your score.

Improvisation

Lecture: Agents of musical interpretation.

Listening:

Afternoon: Steve continued, Hans, Keith
Evening: Scott

Reading: none

Assignment: Trade graphical/text scores; render one sketch from that score.

Final Class

Thank you.

Upcoming performances:
5/1: Live Image, 7PM@ITP
5/6: NIME class, 8PM@Tonic
5/9: Thesis in the Tisch Blackbox

Stelarc's Ping Body performance was likened to Songs to Wear Pants To.

Seek ye plugins from Smart Electronix.

Fruity Loops made an appearance this week.

A current installation at Art In General references Cage's Ryoanji, in turn based on the famous rock garden in Kyoto. There's also live audio by the folks at Free103.

Check out the Waag Scoiety for Old and New Media.