New course: Introduction to electronic music

On Tuesday, I started teaching an introduction to electronic music at the conservatory of Montbéliard. I designed a hands-on course, during which the teenagers hear and analyze a few major works from the 20th century, learn about the nature of sound and its processing inside a computer, record sounds and compose original works. The students are musicians (they play piano, trumpet, bassoon, etc.), but it's the first time they're hearing about Musique concrète, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or DAW.

The students must be able to work at home, so I chose to introduce two free cross-platform tools:

dark side of the moon cover
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon:
the students are analyzing parts of this masterpiece, and learning a lot about electronic music.

The titles of the course plan:

Introduction to electronic music

  • Part 1: Pierre Schaeffer & the railways music
    editing techniques from the era of magnetic tape
  • Part 2: Pink Floyd & the dark side of the moon
    spectrum, filtering, writing symbolic scores
  • Part 3: Lady Gaga & her poker game
    focus on the voice instrument, filtering, sonic personalities
  • Part 4: Stockhausen & the song of the youths
    mixing voice, electronic sounds, instruments & more
  • Part 5: Final projects
    finalizing a composition

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Max for Live: Extreme Time Stretching with Spectral Stretch

Image
There are many ways to achieve audio time stretching without transposition . Some time-based methods build on Pierre Schaefer 's Phonogène . Another approach consists in processing the sound in spectral domain, using a phase vocoder . In this case, the audio samples are converted to spectral data through a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Then, even if we focus on extreme time stretching, the details of the phase vocoder implementation have important consequences on the sound quality and the tool's flexibility for live usage. Before introducing the Max for Live device Spectral Stretch, let's have a look at a selection of four possible algorithms: Paulstretch Max Live Phase Vocoder Interpolation between recorded spectra Stochastic Re-synthesis from a recorded sonogram Paulstretch Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch , also known as Paulstretch , is an algorithm designed by Paul Nasca for extreme time stretching. You might have heard one application already: to this date,
Read more

GroundSwell 2020 Emerging Composers Competition

Image
Groundswell is a wonderful organization dedicated to the development of new music in Winnipeg and the Province of Manitoba, Canada. I've been invited to serve as a member of the committee for their first electroacoustic music competition, along with composer Margaret Schedel and composer William Brunson . It's been a fun and quite interesting adventure. We listened to more than two dozen compositions. I wish we could have included more than 5 finalists: there were a number of atypical nice compositions. To listen, head to the competition page . You'll find links to the finalists' music.
Read more

A Free Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing Using Max/MSP and Jitter

Image
When I discovered electronic music during the Centre Acanthes 2000/Ircam , my favorite topic was real time sound processing in frequency domain. Hans Tutschku taught the wonders of AudioSculpt in Avignon, before Benjamin Thigpen taught Max/MSP in Helsinki. Now, the Computer Music Journal just published an article I wrote about spectral sound processing in real time and performance time ( whereas real-time treatments are applied on a live sound stream, performance-time treatments are transformations of sound files that are generated during a performance ). If you are interested in graphical sound synthesis, phase vocoder , and sonograms (or spectrograms) , I hope you will enjoy this tutorial. The great news is that you can download the article for free on the page of the Computer Music Journal, Issue 32, Volume 3 . Max/MSP/Jitter patches You can readily apply the described techniques in the development environment Max/MSP/Jitter . For a hands-on approach, make sure you download t
Read more