Author: Keith Kothman
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(musTh 212) Final Exam Review, 2012
The Final Exam is comprehensive. You should review posts from the semester. Twilight of the Tonal System (chromatic and doubly chromatic mediants, etc., concepts from Chapter 1)
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(musTh 212) Electronic Music
Late posting. Concrete Music (Musique Concrete) Concrete Music uses prerecorded sounds (often natural sounds) as the source of all of its sounds for a composition. The French were the first to develop this technique, and it draws upon their focus on color (think Debussy, Ravel, etc.), but their development is only a historical origin point.…
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(maxmsp) know your cpu status
Just a last minute post, since crashing seems to be taking over your life. To monitor your total cpu usage, you need to open the Activity Monitor (Mac only). Go to Applications | Utilities | Activity Monitor. You have various ways of looking at your usage. The key is looking at the overall percentage of…
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(musTh 212) Minimalism
Minimalism began as a general reaction to post-WWII modernism, atonality, and integral serialism. As such, there are certain traits that one find in minimalist pieces, but the technique is not uniform (just as there are many ways of composing 12-tone music, or classical period tonal music, for example). Characteristics of minimalism: restricted pitch and rhythmic…
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(musThe 212) Assignment: Texture, Ionisation
Due Wednesday, April 18th. Using the YouTube video embedded below, listen to Varese’s Ionisation. Identify four (4) thematic elements (rhythmic cells) by the time on the video that they occur, and what instrument(s) is playing the element. Musically notate the rhythms for three (3) of the elements. Write a textural analysis, similar to what we did…
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(maxmsp) waveform~ grooving and glitching, maybe graining…
Two demo patchers for this post: waveformGroove.maxpat and waveformGlitch.maxpat. Look at the waveformGroove patcher first. waveform~ The waveform~ object is a graphic editor for buffered audio. The easiest way to make use of waveform~ in a patcher is to copy and paste from the help file. This implementation is copied from the subpatcher for multi-channel…
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(maxmsp) recording to a buffer, more groove
Demo patcher: RecordNGroove.maxpat Today’s demo patcher is based on grooveplay, from the buffer~ and groove~ post. Some minor changes, before diving into the new stuff. The buffer~ object (in the green section) is getting audio from the record~ object. I’ve deleted the read messages. You can put them back in, of course. In the groove section…
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(maxmsp) buffer~ and groove~
I included the example patcher (grooveplay.maxpat) in the zipped soundfilepatcher archive from Monday. buffer~ Preliminary stuff first. buffer~ allows you to load a sound file into RAM. You can play it back with a number of objects, get information about it, etc., but it is in effect like sampler memory. The object takes arguments for…
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(maxmsp) sfplay~ and dropfile
I’ve zipped the example patcher, CtlnAssign, and a couple of sound files into one downloadable folder. sfplay~ MaxMSP has an excellent tutorial and help patchers. My example doesn’t try to recreate everything you can do with sfplay~. I’m focusing on basic playback, the loading of files, and how to create a useful start/stop mechanism with…
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(musTh 212) Classical Serialism
Classical serialism typically refers to the 12-tone composition technique developed by Schoenberg and his followers. The basic premise of the 12-tone system is the row, which is an ordered arrangement, or set, of pitch classes. Each pitch class occurs once, and only once. The row has four basic forms: Prime (P): the original ordered set (row). The transposition…