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

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