assignments

To introduce students to the concepts of Musique Concrète, as pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer, and explore how these ideas can be applied using Ableton Live. Students will create a piece that manipulates recorded sounds to construct a musical composition, focusing on sound transformation and abstract audio textures.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

This assignment invites you to delve into audio synthesis to create a composition that mirrors your personal musical tastes and aesthetic preferences. You’ll use sound design techniques to develop three distinct sounds in Ableton Live, then incorporate these sounds into a 1-2 minute composition within your chosen genre.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Use additive synthesis to combine simple sine waves and create more complex tones.

In this assignment, you will explore additive synthesis by combining simple sine waves to create more complex tones. Starting with a basic sine wave, which lacks harmonics, you’ll follow specific recipes to build richer sounds like square, triangle, and sawtooth waves. For example, a square wave is created by adding sine waves with odd multiples of the fundamental frequency, each at decreasing amplitudes (e.g., 100 Hz, 300 Hz at 1/3 amplitude, etc.). As more sine waves are added, the combined waveform increasingly resembles the target waveform, resulting in a complex tone with rich harmonics. Understanding these harmonic structures is crucial for grasping the basics of sound synthesis and how synths generate these tones.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

This assignment introduces you to the basics of synthesis in Max/MSP using oscillators and sine waves. You will design simple sounds, experiment with basic synthesis techniques, and understand how different parameters affect sound creation.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

This assignment focuses on creating generative music using Max/MSP. You will design a patch that generates evolving musical patterns or textures, exploring the principles of randomness, algorithmic composition, and generative processes.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

In this assignment, you will create custom drum sets using Ableton Live’s Drum Rack. Start by loading a Drum Rack onto a track and triggering the pads with a MIDI keyboard. Next, drag samples like kicks and snares onto the pads, adjusting settings such as start/end points for each sample using the Simpler instrument. Continue adding and arranging samples on other pads as needed. To enhance your sounds, apply effects like EQs and compressors to individual chains or the entire rack. Finally, organize and save your drum rack as a preset for future use. This process offers extensive control and flexibility for your drum sounds. Create custom drum sets by mapping samples to pads, allowing for independent triggering and processing.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

In this assignment, you’ll explore sampling in computer music synthesis by creating a unique composition using various techniques in a DAW like Ableton Live or Logic Pro X. You’ll start by sourcing and editing at least three different sound samples, then experiment with time-stretching, pitch-shifting, and slicing to transform them. Next, you’ll layer these samples with synthesized sounds, apply effects, and use a sampler instrument to create melodic or harmonic elements. Finally, you’ll arrange your samples into a short composition and document your process in a brief report, detailing the techniques and creative decisions you made.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck. They were now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark shapes of ships at anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air.

No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.