SYLLABUS

MUSIC, SCIENCE, and TECHNOLOGY

(timings are tentative)

Fall 2015

Weeks 1 and 2

Get acquainted, organizational. How do we hear sounds ? Basic facts about waves and sampling. Frequency, amplitude, phase, FM and AM

Brief history of electro-acoustic music

Weeks 3-4-5

Musique concrete and electronic music. Synthesizers and MIDI. Making sounds from scratch. Digital sound synthesis techniques (additive, granular, FM, etc.).

Quiz #1

About computers

Week 6 and 7
Computers, compilers, languages, operating systems; a few UNIX commands Visit to the Computer Music Project (CMP); creating individual accounts

Quiz #2

Music and Mathematics

Weeks 8 and 9

Musical parameters (degrees of freedom). How to compose experimental music using: stochastic distributions, set theory, group theory, game theory, Markov chains, fractals, genetic algorithms, "chaos" theory (complex dynamic systems), information theory and other theories with fancy names.

Quiz #3

Applications - working on individual projects

Weeks 10-11-12-13-14

Using DISSCO (Digital Instrument for Sound Synthesis and Composition). Concepts, DISSCO's structure. Tutorial, using simple functions: Random and Select. Spatialization and Reverberation. Modifiers: vibrato, tremolo, glissando, transients.

Presentation of an advance draft of the project

Sonification, Visualization, and Virtual Environments

Week 15

Sonification of complex scientific data. Computational science and vizualization. Auditory displays - challenges in finding a suitable mapping between the space of data and that of sound. Recognition of time patterns and the ear's power of discrimination.

Virtual environments. Complementarity between vizualization and sonification; the need for redundancy. A new type of composer, a new type of scientist: new tools and changing paradigms.

TBA Final Projects presentations

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