Introduction to Computer Music

Artikulation

György Ligeti, while an important composer of the late 20th Century, was primarily an acoustic music composer. He wrote three electronic works in 1957/58. Artikulation was the middle of these works.

The visual score below was produced in the 70's by Rainer Wehinger as an experiment in musical notation.

 

 

This work is available as an Amazon download here.

Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental

This week's listening is a fantastic piece by Charles Dodge, one of the pioneers of musical speech synthesis.

The vocal samples he manipulates are of Enrico Caruso singing his signature aria from Leoncavello's opera Il Pagliacci. The opera may or may not have anything to do with pizza.

This is a performace of Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental from 2009. 

"Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental" by Charles Dodge - Dartmouth College Festival of New Musics 2009 from Digital Musics on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, the microphone placement mostly captured the piano and not the electronics. There is an un-embeddable streaming version with much better sound quality here. 

This piece is available as an Amazon download here.

Gesang der Jünglinge

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a prolific and influential composer in the second half of the 20th century. The Beatles considered him important enough to include on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56) is often considered the first true electronic masterpiece, pre-dating Poème électronique by a couple of years.

 

 

This piece is available for purchase via Amazon download here.

Week Three Instruments

UPDATE: Replacing ear training binaries with versions in presentation mode. Please redownload from these links rather than bookmarks.

A little later than promised, but here are the Week Three example instruments for Max. I have built compiled versions of the ear training tool for both PC and Mac. 

Instrument Archive:

Ear Training tool for PC:

Ear Training tool for Mac:

Week Three Slides

This week, we'll be adding minor/chromatic intervals into the mix and begin working on melodic dictation. On the electronic side, I'll introduce the two most common varieties of Amplitude Modulation.

Slides for Week Three are below.

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco

This is a personal favorite by British composer Jonathan Harvey.

I was intrigued to find that an audiovisual installation piece was done amost 30 years after the original music was written in 1980. This video is of that installation.

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco from visual kitchen on Vimeo.

 

This piece is available as an Amazon download here.

Forbidden Planet

Week Three's listening is music from Forbidden Planet (1956) by Louis & Bebe Barron.

Since you've all seen the movie, I doubt it requires any further introduction.

 

The entire soundtrack is available for purchase here.

Stria

Week Two's listening is Stria (1977) by John Chowning.

 I am unable to find a streaming copy of the original 1977 version that we listened to in class. The abridged version will have to do. 

It's a little disturbing how hard this is to find on the internet -- it's an important piece by the guy who invented FM Synthesis. You'd think it would be more present.

Needless to say, I couldn't find a single-track download for this piece.

Week Two Materials

 

After a break for Halloween, we will be continuing the course tomorrow, Monday, November 7 @ 6:30 PM. As always, the course is taught at Black Lodge Research in Redmond.

Here's what we'll be covering:

• Listening: Stria by John Chowning
• Review: Rhythmic Dictation
• Sight Reading/Ear Training: Recognizing and Singing Intervals
• Synthesis: Additive and Vector Synthesis; Timbre and harmonic series; Beginning Envelopes
• Instruments: Basic MIDI control ; Additive Synthesis; Vector Synthesis

Since the shared Powerpoint slides were less than optimal cross-platform during the first class, the slides have been prepared directly for the web. Click here for week two's slides.

Week One's slides have been similarly prepared and are available here. Here are this week's audio exercises and instruments (for Max/MSP):

A Live Meeting link for this class is available through the discussion list -- click here to join.

Subdividing Rhythms

Musicians use the term "subdividing" to describe how they count more complex rhythms. Calculate the least common unit of duration and keep track of the beat in those terms.

By counting 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &, you now have eight notes for a measure of 4/4. A quarter note would take up 2 of those, a dotted quarter gets 3, a half note gets 4, etc.

You can pre-mark the subdivision to aid in counting (above). The largest lines represent the beat, which each smaller unit marking the sub-division on the beat. Essentially, you're pre-calculating the subdivision so you don't have to compute it on the fly.