Hi my name is Frank Zhang and I am a senior in Electrical & Computer Engineering. My major background means that I am familiar with the electrical & electronics aspects such as circuits, signal processing, etc. I also play violin. I am open to collaboration so if anyone is interested feel free to reach out to me!
Assignment 0: Cindy Zhang
Hello everyone!
My name is Cindy, and nice to meet you all in this course!
I am a second-year Master in Information Science. Being an amateur in music, I like playing the piano, and especially likes to search for the piano versions of the songs I like. While listening to music, I would always think about the way to interpret it only by piano in order to keep the original patterns of the music as well as adding on the unique characteristics of piano. I have made several piano version sheets for my favorite music using Musescore. The experience of polishing my composition is really enjoyable.
I found that this course is mainly about learning music synthesis and composition. Taking this course, I am looking forward to getting to know how to use digital music softwares and tools such as launch pad, which is a completely new area for me. I hope I could gain inspirations not only in transferring songs to piano versions, but also creating my own rhythm and composition with various instruments or resources. I am also excited to learn from everyone, to know their favorite and advanced areas, and make friends with people with same interest.
Again, I’m happy to meet everyone, and hope we could have a great time exploring computer music!
Assignment 0: Amy Wang
Hello! My name is Amy, and I’m a computer science major who’s also minoring in music. In my free time, I enjoy playing the flute and making acoustic tracks with Reaper, but I have very little experience making more “experimental” or digital music. Hopefully this course can push me outside my comfort zone and help me gain a better mastery of DAWs and editing software in general. I also want to learn to use different hardware and equipment. Open to collaborating!
Assignment 0: Mark Mahoney
Hi all! My name’s Mark, and I’m very excited to get to know you and your music over the course of this semester.
I’m a second-year PhD student in musicology with an interest in experimental and improvised music. I have a bit of experience with pen-and-paper composition, and dealing with analog sound (I ran tech for shows at a small non-profit in Chicago prior to returning to school), but have virtually no hands-on experience with digital music-making practices.
I’m also very excited just to have a reason to make some music again – as someone who usually creates music in improvised contexts with others (mostly on brass instruments and sometimes keyboards), the pandemic was very isolating!
My primary goals for the course are to develop some basic facility working with DAWs and other tools, and to experiment with what’s possible. Elastic Arts, my old workplace, currently has a 16-speaker system for electroacoustic music installed, so if I’m feeling ambitious I may try to create something which I could play over that system. I’m very open to collaboration and can’t wait to hear what emerges from this class.