From January 20-22, I attended the 2011 Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States national conference with 6 of my Digital Arts students from Stetson. My piece “also apply” was featured in the Genelec Listening Room. I found it to be a nice, relaxed atmosphere for featured composers to gather, hear each others’ work, and chat in between about the music.
I wrote an extended blog post about the trip for the Digital Arts blog which is linked below. It was so great to see my colleagues from around the United States and catch up on some amazing work that people are doing. A great trip!
Title: Enhancing musical skills through sound design
Description: Sound design is the process of crafting sonic elements for film or video projects. Practicing this aural art form develops students’ critical listening skills and ability to make compositional decisions. This session will outline the concepts, vocabulary, artists, and software you need to know for developing a sound design project.
This presentation grew out on my experiences teaching the sound design unit in DIGA 101. The topic of sound design allowed me to overcome much of the early hesitancy that non-musicians had about working with music technology in our Digital Arts program. The goal of my presentation was to introduce the topic to K-12 music teachers with existing technology curricula who may want new project ideas for their classroom. The premise is that although sound design is not equivalent to music, it can enhance students’ musical skills and understanding in new ways.
Thanks so much to everyone that attended my presentation. And once again, thanks to Nick Eggen for the invitation to present.
I neglected to include credits for images and other media within the enhanced podcast, but will provide links in the comments of this post.
Back in 2008, I wrote two CD reviews for Array (a.k.a. the Journal of the International Computer Music Association). One of the reviews for a CD by Erdem Helvacioglu was positive, while the second for a CD by Bob Gluck was not.
In a follow up issue published last year, they published a letter to the editor that Bob wrote in response to my review. He objected to some of my review methods and offered some factual corrections.
As academics often do, I wrote a response to the response in an effort to continue the dialogue about the following questions: What role does criticism play in electronic and computer music? What expectations should we as practitioners place upon such criticism? What is the right balance between objectivity and subjectivity?
If you travel over there and have an opinion on the matter, please comment! I think this is an important discussion on the role of criticism and I would love to hear more voices on the matter.
It’s that time of year again. Yes, it is the holidays. BUT…it is also time for final projects from my Digital Arts students. The Fall 2010 crop of students in DIGA 461 Computer Music did a fantastic job exploring algorithmic composition via Max/MSP in their fourth and final project. They produced some creative projects and some equally creative videos to document their work. I hope everybody enjoys these!
Max/MSP Saves Christmas – 4 min, 17 sec
Frank ‘n’ Bots – 4 min, 20 sec
Santa’s Merry Algorithmic Patch of Joy – 4 min, 22 sec
Brownian, Euclidian, and Genetic Algorithms – 7 min, 56 sec
Eric Baum recently completed his senior research project for a BA in Digital Arts – Sound. He decided to design and build a combination electric and bass guitar that he then enhanced with a variety of sensors. He used the Teabox from Electrotap to manage his sensor connections and built a Max/MSP patch to allow him to loop, filter and process the output from his guitar. The results can be seen and heard in the following video:
Custom Music Sensor Interface – 6 min, 17 sec
When he is not making custom instruments, Eric is co-manager and bassist for Run Rhino. I am proud to have advised Eric during his time at Stetson and through this project. I look forward to seeing what the next steps in his career will be.
On October 13, I received a random phone call in my office from Wyatt Danowski. It seems he was looking for an expert in electronic music history and found me after some Google searching. There was an upcoming electronic music festival in his region of Ottawa, Canada and he was writing a piece for his newspaper. I happen to teach a course at Stetson called History of Electronic Music (MUSC 195A), which I guess qualifies me as an expert.
I happily chatted with him for about 15 minutes about the high points from the last 100+ years and my perspective on genres. The results were an article that ran in the late October issue of The Charlatan (which is “Carleton’s Independent Weekly”). One correction though: he seemed to mis-hear “tape” as “take”. But overall it was a fun experience that I would be glad to repeat if anyone else is looking for an expert in this area.
I just returned from several days at the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States National Conference. In addition to hearing loads of new music, I gave a presentation on the MPG Carepackage. This continues my efforts to get more people using this collection of patches for networking computers running Max/MSP/Jitter and sharing musical data. Overall, the reaction was positive and I hope many of my colleagues from around the country will follow up by downloading the following files:
It is worth noting that I gave this MPG Carepackage lecture earlier at FEAST in November and you can download a recording of that presentation. At FEAST, I was a little less pressed for time and so it might be easier to understand the more relaxed pace of that version.
I also had a chance to spend some time with two former Stetson students: Jana Fisher (BA/2009) and Chester Udell (BM/2005). Jana had a piece entitled Top40:France selected for the conference. She created this spectral composition for her senior project and it sounded fantastic on the big Genelec speakers. Chester had a piece for trombone and live electronics that was really well done and I am not the only one that thought so; Chester was awarded first place in the annual SEAMUS/ASCAP Student Commission! Big congrats to him as this is a huge honor.
All in all a good conference. Looking forward to hearing where next year will be held.
Banners around campus made sure you knew where you were at.
The athletics office here at Stetson called me up a while back and asked if anybody would be interested in doing a basketball halftime performance. They asked for something unusual and unexpected. I put together a special group called Fuel Efficiency: Nathan Wolek (laptop sequencing), Stephen Garza (guitar & loop effects), Patrick Sante (bass), Eric Baum (laptop effects).
Three rehearsals later, I was pretty happy with the results. You can listen to the piece we created for this Feb 20th gig below. I hope we can get the group together again and make more music in the future.
This piece continues my exploration of the potential for laptops in chamber music settings. The piano controls the momentum by choosing from among the musical materials on each page of the score, and in doing so slowly unfolds a harmonic sequence over the piece’s duration. The laptop is used to capture and extend the acoustic output, producing textures that at first only fill in the silences between notes and eventually compete with the piano for attention. The tension builds until the harmonic sequence is finally stated in its entirety, after which the piece unwinds to the final coda. The overall mood is one of reflection, with moments of peace and passion.
My lecture from this year’s FMEA is now available for download. The presentation highlighted how the media has helped propel the concept of the laptop as instrument into the public consciousness. It concluded with some ideas on how K12 music educators can start to wrap their heads about the potentials of making laptop music.
Special thanks to Nick Eggen and the FMEA tech committee for the invite.
BTW, a majority of the photos used my slides were obtained via Flickr, where they are posted under a Creative Commons license. As with all the other content on my site, this podcast is offered under a similar license. Although the photo credits are contained in the presentation, I will also post them in the comments for those that might be interested.
