The following is the Music 6420 listening list for Spring 2009. Recordings are available in the Cornell Music Library or in the sflib "listening" directory on CEMC systems. Students are encouraged to review these items for further study.

The purpose of this list is to familiarize students with important works of electronic music.

Antheil — Ballet mécanique (CD 10130) and video on http://www.antheil.org
Babbitt — Philomel (CD 5102)
Berio — A-ronne ( Rec 1586 B502 A7)
Berio — Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)
Berio — Visage (Rec 175 E4 E31)
Boulez — Répons --M1045.B76 R4 2001 Folio (CD 8509)
Cage — Imaginary landscape no. 1 (CD 4355)
Cage — William's mix (CD3670)
Carlos — Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Mvt. 4 (in sflib)
Carlos — Timesteps (in sflib)
Davidovsky — Synchonisms #6 (CD 1312)
Dodge — Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental (CD 2605)
Dodge — Earth’s magnetic field (CD 6713)
Eno — Music for Airports (Rec 3 .1 E6)
Harvey — Mortuos plango, vivos voco (Rec 5 I65)
Harvey — Bhakti -- M947.H34 B5 1989 (CD 12107)
Henry — Musique de notre temps (CD 2588)
Hiller/Cage — HPSCHD (Rec 175 E4 C13 H2)
Kagel — Transition I (Rec 175 E4 E31)
Lansky — Idle Chatter, Just-more-idle-chatter, Notjustmoreidlechatter (CD 7313)
Lansky — Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion (CD 3691)
Ligeti — Artikulation (CD5601) -- M1473.L72 A8 1994
Lucier — Music on a Long Thin Wire -- Rec 1473 L93 M8
Lucier — I am siiting in a room (CD 5317)
Lucier — Nothing is Real (Strawberry Fields) -- CD 14046
Lucier — Crossings (score only, recording on order)
Marshall — Fog Tropes (in sflib)
Matthews, Max — Bicycle Built for Two. (CD 8717)
Mel Powell — Strand settings: darker (CD 9615 v.8)
Oliveros — Sound Patterns (http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/extended_voices/Extended-Voices_1_Pauline-Oliveros.mp3)
Reich — Come out (CD 1613)
Reich — Pendulum music (CD 9026)
Risset — 'L'Autre Face (CD 5101)
Risset — Sud (CD 6649)
Risset — Songes (CD 14870)
Saariaho — NoaNoa, flute (CD 9010, CD 9035)
Saariaho — Près (CD 9035)
Saariaho — Prisma (installation CDROM, CD 8971 Box)
Schaeffer/Henri — Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (Symphony for a Man Alone) -- CD 2588
Schaeffer — Études aux chemins de fer
Subotnick — Silver Apples on the Moon (Rec 175 E4 S94 S5)
Subotnick — The last dream of the beast ( Rec 1497 L112)
Subotnick — Wild Bull (Rec 175 E4 S94 W6)
Stockhausen — Hymnen (Rec 1473 S86 H9)
Stockhausen — Kontakte with piano and perc -- M342.S86 K8 Folio (Rec 1473 S86 K8)
Stockhausen — Gesang der Jünglinge (in sflib)
Stockhausen — Mantra (CD 5856)
Varèse — Déserts (CD 7232)
Varèse — Poèm Électronique(CD 7232)
Wishart — Vox, no. 5 (CD 8717)
Wourinen — Time's Encomium (CD 5693)
Xenakis — Concrete PH (Rec 1473 X51 E3)
Xenakis — Mycenae Alpha -- UPIC score online (CD 5102)
Xenakis — Orient-Occident (Rec 1473 X51 E3)

Note that the due date has changed from November 5th to the 12th.

As with Project One, your primary goal should be to create something musically engaging (both to us and to you), something beyond the technical focus of the assignments.  The duration should be between 3 and 5 minutes.  I would suggest one of two approaches:

- Continue your work from the first project, expanding upon or reworking materials or ideas from your initial piece.

- Use this project as an opportunity to experiment with a new idea looking toward the final project and concert.

With respect to software tools, I recommend you use any and all of the tools at your disposal which serve your musical intentions.  Here are three possible guidelines:

1. Create a song using Reason.  As we have discovered Reason presents a remarkably flexible and powerful environment, a self-contained compositional toolkit.  Having done several shorter pieces there, now compose something more substantial.

2. Using Reason as a potential sound resource, create a mix/song/pastiche in Cubase or Live.  You can combine the capabilities of these applications via Rewire or simply build your sound sources as individual soundfile/submixes exported from Reason.

3. Use any or all (or none) of the tools from the semester, investigating new ones if needed (perhaps exploring JACK, networked MIDI, or others presented/suggested during lecture).  Try to get beyond what any one applications does "well" to what they can do for your idea.

If you have any questions or would like further information, don't hesitate to contact me directly.

Using the Vocoder rack module in Reason, create a short, 40sec to 1min mix using a vocal recording (such as your first assignment) as the filter/modulator. You may use any sounds you like as the "driver", both those internally generated by Reason (SubTractor, NN-XT, ReDrum, etc), and other samples made or recorded elsewhere.

Be as creative as you like, using multiple vocodes or other musical layers to "accompany" the vocoded sounds.

The Subtractor is Reason's virtual synthesizer which combines several synthesis types into a whole.  It features wavetable synthesis (the actual sound generators, the waveforms), subtractive synthesis, and several levels of modulation (pitch, amplitude, filter frequency, phase, etc).  Understanding the signal path within this network of sound producing and sound modifying modules will help you grasp just what the Subtractor can do.

First, the two available oscillators (VCO, Voltage Controlled Oscillator) constitute the sound source. There are classical oscillators such as the sine wave, triangle wav, square wave, sawtooth wave, etc.  But Reason has it's own family of waveforms, some imitating the timbre of acoustic sounds.  A complete description of each availabel waveform along with playable soundfiles can be found here.  You will find this page useful as a reference.

Second, the new waveform passes into the filter-section (VCF, Voltage Controlled Filter) where various filter types (high-pass, low-pass, band-pass, notch) alter the spectrum of the original oscillator.  This is the "subtractive" portion of the Subtractor and where a lot of the magic happens.  Filters can give life to otherwise static timbres.

The third step is allows you to control the waveform's amplitude envelope (Voltage Controlled Amplitude). Here the standard ADSR envelope is used.

There are four parts to the envelope, one for each of A-D-S-R:

They all are sequentially setting in, a key is pressed.

    -Attack controls how fast a signal goes from zero to maximum level.
    -Decay determines the amount of time it takes for a signal to decay to the Sustain level.
    -Sustain is important for the level which is held until a note ends.
    -Release, finally, how fast the envelope fades to zero, to be precise, how long a note keeps on sounding after the MIDI key is released.

Subtractor's section four allows one to apply an ADSR envelope to the modulator and the filter.  These are time-varying envelopes just as with amplitude.  As with the amplitude envelope, this shape gives the note a dynamic character, this time affecting it's timbre.

Finally in stage five the signal is modulated by an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator).  This LFO can modulate any one of several parameters of the sound.  Toggling through the various modes you will hear how this impacts the timbre.  LFO's are slow-moving waveforms which are used to modulate some aspect of the original "carrier" signal, creating motion within the sound, giving it richness and life.  Notice that LFO 2 has something that LFO 1 does not: a delay.  This allows the modulator to be activated at some time later than the initial attack.

For the Impatient 

lsex sc

getex EXAMPLE_NAME > NEWFILE

score11 NEWFILE

mko INSTRUMENT_NAME

csound -d orc sout

play test.wav

Overview 

This guide is intended as a cheat-sheet for users already familiar with the basic operation of accessing and compiling Score11/Csound score and orchestra files on Cornell systems.  Below are the basic steps to start making sound right away as well as a few helpful tips for speeding up the process of using Csound with Score11.

The easiest way to learn Score11 syntax and operation is to use the examples provided on Cornell systems.  To list the available Score11 examples, type:

lsex sc

This will list all examples by name. To access any one of these examples, type:

getex EXAMPLE_NAME

 ...where EXAMPLE_NAME is the same of the example from the list.

This will display the example text in the terminal window.  To capture this output as text to edit or save, rerun the getex command, this time capturing the output to a file using the Unix redirection (>) syntax:

getex EXAMPLE_NAME > NEWFILE

 ...where NEWFILE is the name you wish to give to it.

You now have a copy of the example in your home directory, ready to edit.  To process the file with score11 (since it is a ready-to-tuse example on its own), simply type:

score11 NEWFILE

 ...where NEWFILE is again the file you captured with getex.  This will create a new file, an output named sout.  This is Score11's default output name.  It will overwrite the previous sout file if one existed. 

Remember that the sout file can always be regenerated from the original Score11 file.

Once the sout file has been generated, we now need and accompanying orchestra file.  A list of all available instruments can be viewed with:

lsins 

In almost all cases, the orchestra name is simply the same name as the root name of the example.  So marimba1, marimba2, and marimba3 all using the MARIMBA orchestra.  To generate the matching orchestra file automatically, type:

mko INSTRUMENT_NAME

 ...which stands for "make orchestra", where INSTRUMENT_NAME is the name of the instrument you wish to generate (MARIMBA, for example).  This command will create a usable Csound orchestra named orch.orc. or simply orc for short.  You are now ready to make sound using the sout from score11 and the orc from mko.  To do this type: from

csound -d orc sout 

Notice the addition of the "-d".  This will suppress the display window that ordinarily pops up.  Leave out the "-d" if you wish to see this window.

Csound will output an audio file compiled from the note/event list you gave it from Score11 and the orchestra/instrument generated with mko.  To listen to the result, by default named "test.wav" written to your current working soundfile directory, just type:

play test.wav

Note: If you are running Score11/Csound from a remote computer, playing the soundfile will actually play the sound ON THE REMOTE SYSTEM.  If you wish to listen the result locally, simply copy the .wav file from the remote system using an scp client (GUI or command line).  See here for more information.

Some Helpful Shortcuts 

Because many of the commands listed above output default filenames such as sout or test.wav, standard Unix shortcuts like !sc (reruns the most recent command starting with "sc", in this case score11) or !cs (reruns the most recent command starting with "cs", in this case csound,) can be quite helpful.  In the process of working you will often be making small changes to the notes/events in your Score11 file, then re-running score11/csound to regenerate the soundfile with those changes.  It saves time and typing to simply do:

!sc

!cs

!p

Notice that third, command.  It will also rerun your "play" command.  The cycle can then continue.  Make your changes, run !sc, !cs, !p and listen to the result.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Advanced users will notice further that Unix allows you to execute more than one command in sequence on the same line by simply separating them with a semi-colon (;), like this:

score11 NEWFILE ; csound -d orc sout ; play test.wav

This will be treated as a single command sequence.  So running !sc will now RERUN THE ENTIRE LINE (remember, it runs the most recent command starting with "sc"), meaning the user can rerun all steps needed to generate a soundfile in this one command.

Questions or comments should be directed to the forums. 

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Audacity is a simple yet powerful tool and is recommended for all users for their home systems.  Audacity is not a monolithic solution to every audio situation.  It is simply an audio editor and it performs in that role exceedingly well.  Other available soundfile editors include Peak (also available at Cornell), Cooledit (now Adobe Audition), Sweep, Wavesurfer, Soundforge, Wavelab...and a list of others whose further enumeration would deplete valuable documentation space.  Audacity fulfills the requirement of a powerful editor while being easy to use, light-weight, stable, and free (in both the sense of cost as of liberty...you can grab the sourcecode and change it to suit your needs).

You may also wish to paruse the various online tutorials.  The official Audacity site hosts it's own tutorials here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2

But there are several others to be found on the web.  For example here and here.  Of course there are plenty of others.

Beyond the material covered in Music 1421 directly, there are plenty of other novel ways to use Audacity.

Students can upload and download files to and from the studios using the secure shell protocol (SSH).  To arrange a username and password, please contact Eric Feinstein.  An account will be created for you on the studio server.  You can then access your account using one of many SSH client applications.  To download a client for your system, visit http://www.openssh.com as look in the left-hand side-bar for links for your operating system (Linux, Mac OS, Windows, etc).  For the Mac, I recommend Fugu.  For Windows I recommend WinSCP, and for Linux I recommend gFTP or the powerful command-line "ssh".

Advanced users, please follow the link below to "command line SSH".

Once installed, login with:

Hostname: digitial.music.cornell.edu

Port: 22 

Username: (your username)

Password: (your password)

Most SSH clients work like FTP displaying a local and remote directory tree.  You can copy files or directories from one location to the other either for backup or to relay files in either direction for your use.

On the Digital Music server, users may upload files to one of two locations, 1) a backup folder appropriate for the backup or relay of large files listed in the user's home directory as "backup", and 2) a "public" webspace for linking or public download,listed in the us er's home server directory as "webspace".  Items copied into this latter directory will be visible on the web, downloadable using any standard browser.  The web address for these files would be:

http://digital.music.cornell.edu/(username)

The first step in basic recording (or nearly any process which involves input and output, for that matter) is understanding signal path.  This is simply the path from the source (input) to the destination (recording, speakers, live process, etc).  Let's use the classic situation of a vocalist recording her voice into a computer as our model and trace the signal path:

Source: human voice
Destination: audio data file

1. Microphone - spoken voice enters the microphone
2. Microphone pre-amp (Trim) - the signal is boosted on the way in
3. Mixer channel strip - fader is raised, sending the signal to the mix
4. Mixer main output - output fader is raised, sending the signal out
5. Computer input - signal is received and digitized
6. Application input - recording software application "hears" the final signal

Or represented linearly using the above numbering:

1 --> 2 --> 3 --> 4 --> 5 --> 6 

This description is slightly verbose, but it illustrates the many places a simple signal visits in its journey to being recorded.  Each of these locations represent  points in the signal path where the signal can be degraded or lost.  Thus, care should be taken to seek the shortest path the from source to destination leaving fewer chances for such degradation.  After all, one can only get out what one puts in.  All of this points to our next subject, that of controlling the signal along its path through "gain staging".

For Cornell studio-specific information, see:

Recording with Audacity (online tutorial)

And for related topics for further reading:

Cornell Ornithology Labs: Field Recording Techniques

Basics of Digital Recording

Binaural Recording

One of the first and most important concept to understand for recording is signal-to-noise ratio.  In analog systems, this refers to the available bandwidth for the signal relative to the noise inherent in its physical system (circuits, recording medium).

In the digital realm there is no inherent physical noise (except where it interfaces with the analog realm) except during the process of quantization.  Our goal in the digital world is to maximize the signal relative to this quantization noise, a value determined by the number of bits the recording system is using.  We want to excite as many of these available bits as possible, filling them with signal to overcome the quantization noise.  To do so is a matter of signal resolution, not of volume.

Course Description:

Intended principally for doctoral students in music composition but open to others by permission. The course presents a practical overview of both classical and state-of-the-art techniques for computer music including digital synthesis, signal processing and sound manipulation, analysis and resynthesis, spatialization, and real-time and/or interactive applications. Students will produce several short studio projects as well as one larger piece to be presented in a final concert.