PROJECTS

Submit your assignments to the Box Account with the following content:

  • An AIF or WAV file (with standard sampling rate and bit depth) labelled with the specified filename

  • Screen shot(s) of your software session

Compositions are graded based on technical proficiency (lack of technical errors), following the requirements outlined for each assignment, and musical creativity and imagination

Etude #1: Bridging Worlds

Preliminary score due 11/11 by 1:30PM (uploaded to Box or handed to me)

Final piece and updated score due 11/18 by 1:30PM

Using sound material recorded on a portable recorder, sounds from the Theremin, and/or the ARP Synthesizer, compose a short etude based on an original score. Utilize a DAW of your choice to modify the sounds and to mix the sounds together (you’re welcome to use whatever effects you’d like; we will discuss many in class, too). 

The final piece must be 3 to 5 minutes in duration (strictly). One of the issues you must confront is the apparent disconnect between sounds of musique concrète and elektronische musik. You are welcome, encouraged in fact, to simply use the sounds you have already recorded for our previous assignments and my in-class ARP demo.

A draft of your score is to be turned in at the beginning of class on November 11th. It may be made on paper or be digital. It should include a timeline. Everything else is up to you - text, graphics, photos, drawings, musical notation, and so on. But whatever you use, it should help me grasp what the music might be like. Find some way of notating volume, timbre, density, duration, cadence, form, stereo field, acoustic space, and so on. Like any other musical score, it will change and mutate during your compositional process. You must register the musical changes on the score. The score is not merely a starting point, it should match the finished version of the music. 

Label your final mix LastnameFirstname_bridgingworlds

Etude #2: Three Spaces and a Silence

Final piece (no score) due 1/11 by 1:30PM

For sound materials for this Etude, you may use field recordings, studio recordings (including of the synthesizers in Studio 4), and any virtual synthesizers or samplers you’d like.

Any and all effects and processing are also welcome in creating this work, but explore ones you’re not used to. As this Etude allows you to use all sounds and techniques, I would also ask that you explore sounds and tools that are new to you, not those you’re very used to. Additionally, consider focusing on the expressivity of careful parameter automation.

This work should be no shorter than 3 minutes and no longer than 5 minutes. Additionally, your work should adhere to the following stipulations: first, it should have at least one moment of digital silence, and second, it should contain at least three “spaces”.

Your interpretation of what a “space” constitutes could be taken literally—field recordings made in different spaces, or different artificial reverberation applied to your sound materials—but it may also be taken more figuratively: a bright space, a dull space, a calm space, a frenetic space, a smooth space, a striated or spiky space, and so forth.

Your (at least) three “spaces” need not be of the same duration, they may recur multiple times during the work, but they should be perceptibly quite different.

Label your final mix LastnameFirstname_threespacesandasilence