Computer Music: Design/Perform: Classes

Week 1

Class 1
Some examples of the musical use of sound we normally wouldn’t think of as musical.
- Paul Lansky: Table’s Clear (1992)
  Notice how seemingly random hits on pots and pans begin to coalesce into a clear rhythmic scheme, and the pots and pans take on the tuning of a dominant seventh harmony, and later other chords. Also, you have the feeling that you're witnessing a family at play, as the composer's two young sons accompany him on kitchen percussion.
- Hildegard Westerkamp: Talking Rain (1997)
  She works effectively with an ambiguity between faithfully captured natural sounds (rain, birds, cars) and enhanced/processed versions.
- Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai): Postfabric (2005)
  
  Some of these sounds might have come from recordings of fax machines, printers, cell phones, and radio static — or, more likely, they are synthetic simulations of these sound sources. In any case, these are not traditionally musical sounds, but they are woven together to form a glitchy, stop-and-go, beat-oriented continuity, with some of the sounds standing in for the drums that would appear in a more conventional context.
Class 2
In Z361 we learned about recursive comb filters, or resonators. These are made by using a delay line with high feedback (that’s the recursive part) and a very short delay time, which becomes the period of a pitch that, along with its harmonic partials, resonates.

One way to color real-world sounds with pitch is to run them through a bank of resonators.
The train recordings at the beginning of Alicyn Warren’s Path of Iron are treated in this way (until 2:15).
- Alicyn Warren: Path of Iron (1999)
Class 3
The simplest way to treat real-world sounds as musical is to throw them into a sampler and play, allowing the simple varispeed method of transposition (in which time and pitch are linked, as in an analog tape recorder) to transform the sound. That seems to be the approach taken in Oswald’s piece.
- John Oswald: Bell Speeds (1990)
  The composer’s program note:
  “the pealing of a bell the size of a pea, heard in eight octaves”
Another way to color real-world sounds with pitch is to use a bank of bandpass filters, as in the excerpt starting about 2:00 in this piece.
- John Gibson: Day Trip (2000)

Week 2

MLK day – no class
Class 4
Granulation takes sound and breaks it into tiny sound particles — grains of sound — and then reconstructs them into dense streams.
For more detail, see Granulation of Sampled Sound, a short article by Barry Truax about the aesthetics and technique of granular sampling.
- Iannis Xenakis: Concret PH (1958)
  Short program note for Concret PH
- Barry Truax: Pacific (1990), movements II (“Fog”) and IV (“Dragon”)
  Truax’s program note for Pacific
- Fennesz: Saffron Revolution (2008)
Class 5
The musical use of everyday sound was a preoccupation of the French musique concrète composers. We listened to a small part of the 45-minute long
- Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir (Variations on a Door and a Sigh, 1963) by Pierre Henry.
Then we heard an excerpt from music by Jonty Harrison, a contemporary practitioner of musique concrète:
- Internal Combustion (2006). Look for the playback link on that page. Read Harrison’s program note (scroll down).

Week 3

Class 6
We explored SPEAR (Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis), an excellent graphical implementation of the McAulay-Quatieri (MQ) sound analysis algorithm, which decomposes a sound into many sinusoidal partials. You edit these partials using a variety of tools (time scaling, frequency or pitch shifting, amplitude scaling, or simply drawing new partials) and then resynthesize them into a new sound file.
We also listened to materials and rough drafts of Project 1 that some of you brought in.
Class 7
We listened to more of your work toward Project 1.
Class 8
Working on Project 1.

Week 4

Class 9
Introduction of Project 2.
Four main issues when thinking about how sound and video work together:
- dialog, sound effects, or music?
- diegetic versus non-diegetic sound
  (diegetic: existing in the fictional world of the film, potentially audible to characters)
- pacing / phrasing of sound and image
- mood / emotional tone
We studied some film clips...
- Diva (dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981)
  Jules, a young motorcycle messenger who is obsessed with Cynthia Hawkins, an opera singer, rides his bike to one of her concerts. We hear orchestral music, which we assume is non-diegetic music. Then he switches off his radio, and the sound goes away. So the music is diegetic after all. As Jules approaches the concert hall, we hear the orchestra tuning up. When he enters the hall, and we see him from within this space, the orchestral sound suddenly becomes louder. This is the way it would sound to Jules, so we’re experiencing the sound as he would.
- Star Trek: The Cage (dir. Robert Butler, 1965)
  This is from the pilot episode of the original Star Trek series. A landing party, lead by Captain Pike, and including Mr. Spock, beams down to a planet emanating a distress signal. Once they are on the planet, we hear an eerie, sustained chord, which comes across as a non-diegetic enhancement of the mysterious planet. But as Pike and Spock come upon some bright blue flowers, it becomes clear that the sound is coming from the flowers.
- Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999)
  The protagonist, a recall investigator for a car company, provides narration about his alienated road warrior life as we view a montage of clips showing him rushing to and fro while travelling, sitting bleary-eyed on airplanes, resting in his hotel room, etc. A sudden scene change places him in a warehouse examining a totalled car with two sardonic accomplices. The sudden clang of the massive warehouse door opening provides a sonic accent that supports the change of scene from his hotel room to the warehouse and puts an end to the soft techno music that accompanies all the narration to this point. The narration carries us into the next scene, inside an airplane, where it becomes obvious that the most recent narration, in the warehouse, was really diegetic, directed to his airplane seat-mate, rather than directly to us as non-diegetic sound.
Class 10
More film clips...
- Atonement (dir. Joe Wright, 2007)
  The opening credits feature the sound of a typewriter punching out the letters we see. This sound is front and center, and seems very close to us. Then the camera pans around a child’s room to find one of the main characters, Briony Tallis, typing up her new play. As the camera moves, the sound of the typewriter changes in a realistic way. After she pulls the last sheet out of the typewriter, Briony gets up and walks out of her room in a determined manner. The typing follows as part of the background music (piano and string orchestra) that has just begun, and it becomes a percussion instrument, playing martial rhythms that fit with the orchestra. This is a rare example of diegetic sound that morphs into a clear role within non-diegetic music.
- Delicatessen (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1991)
  In post-apocalyptic France, an apartment building houses a group of people who are completely under the thumb of Clapet, the butcher and landlord. We see them going about their daily lives as Clapet has his way with one of the female tenants. The rhythm of the bedsprings synchronizes with the sounds of the tenants we see in other rooms, as all accellerate toward a climax. The sound acts as a metaphor for the control over the tenants exercised by the butcher. It’s an unusual example of diegetic sounds forming a musical continuity.
We looked at the clip you will score, a scene from Fritz Lang’s classic silent film, Metropolis (1927), and learned how to synchronize its video frames with notes in Digital Performer.
Class 11
- Babel (dir. Alejandro Gonzáz Iñitu, 2006)
  This is a beautiful example of evocative background music — by Argentinian guitarist and composer, Gustavo Santaolalla — paired with a vivid montage sequence, with very little diegetic sound. The phrasing, chord changes, and affect of the music fit the edited video well. We focused on some moments that show this.
- Traffic (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2000)
  Another montage sequence with background music, this clip shows a jailed drug lord, Carlos Ayala, trying from behind bars to guide his wife, Helena, to a hidden record of bank account numbers in their home. After her discovery, the scene suddenly cuts to drug czar, Robert Wakefield, flying in a helicopter above Mexico City. The background music, which tracks the growing intensity of Helena’s search, flows right over this scene break and in its dreamy, floating quality matches the slow descent of the helicopter over the city.