Category: sonicArts

We need to press ahead with our technical knowledge. From An Introduction to Music Technology, read: Chapter 2, “Sound Properties and the Waveform View” Chapter 5, “Digital Audio Data” I’ve covered most of these chapters in class, and will clean up some of the missing stuff today. These two chapters should be mostly review.

For your 2-track collage project I am limiting you to a set of classic concrete music editing and processing techniques: cut/copy/paste gain change (as an envelope, or overall) playback speed change (without maintaining pitch – speed change should create a pitch change) change of direction (reverse) equalization This post gives you the specific commands in…

To study for our upcoming quiz (take-home), please read chapter 2 of Introduction to Music Technology, pp. 17 – 26. This section of chapter two corresponds to the properties of sound that I went over in lecture. You do need to know waveform types at this point, nor envelopes.

To quote the website, freesound.org “is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds.” You can share and download sounds, with the sharing terms designated through the type of Creative Commons license specified. As in any free, online archive, the quality of sounds and recordings can vary widely, but you will find a large collection of sounds…

Two-track collage, concrete music Due: September 20, 2012 Project Description Create a concrete music composition using three to five recorded sound sources, lasting at least 1 minute. Your tools will be Peak (and/or Audacity), and classic concrete music editing procedures such as cut/copy/paste, gain change, speed change, change of direction, and equalization. All of your…

I’ve prepared a short-answer set of questions that deal with topics and issues raised by our first set of readings. Download the word document, insert your answers into the document, and email your answers back to me by the beginning class next Tuesday (9/11). Please use my @bsu account, and a subject of “reading assignment…

For those of you wanting a fairly good audio editor for free, that works on either Mac or Windows (and even Linux, for the propellerheads among you), I suggest checking out Audacity. We will actually do some of our classroom editing on Audacity, as it comes with a built-in noise reduction process. Audacity is open…

Analog and digital recording describe the different ways that energy is transduced (changed from one from into another) and ultimately stored. Analog Recording With analog recording, the energy that results from each transduction fluctuates in an analogous way to the prior fluctuation of energy. Consider the analog recording and playback chain: sound waves (air pressure) -> microphone…

Two more reading assignments from Audio Culture to complete our first unit. Morton Feldman: “Sound, Noise, Varèse, Boulez” (AC, pp. 15 – 16) Henry Cowell: “The Joys of Noise” (AC, pp. 22 – 24)

Understanding the properties of sound involves separating the physical properties from the perceptual properties. Physical properties are things we can measure. Perceptual properties describe how humans perceive specific physical properties. In general, human perception is exponentially related to physical properties. Frequency and Pitch Frequency is the measurement of the rate of sound vibrations, measure in cycles per…