In the description for HW1 is the following sentence: “The resulting audio file should be approximately 10-15 seconds long, cleanly edited and ready for us to listen.” Could you expand upon what ‘cleanly edited’ entails (are fade-ins/fade-out required? Should we be editing out any extraneous noise and/or breath sounds etc….)? My initial thought is that this assignment is more about learning how to capture a good signal rather than audio editing, but I’d like to be sure. Thanks.

Hell everyone! Here are the materials we are using for today’s class. The link to download a recording of Neil Armstrong on the moon and a file drop for sharing our work with each other.

“One small step for [a] man…”

Also, here are the listening materials:

Steve Reich, Come Out (1966)

Check out an interesting article about this piece here.

Dennis DeSantis, Five Minutes, Today, Forever. (2006)

With material taken from a quote by Reagan, “We begin bombing in 5 mins…”

If we have questions about class topics, homework etc…., is this an appropriate forum for which to get answers from the Professor and/or the TA’s?

Hello!

My name is Edward Fang and I’m a senior studying information sciences in Arts and Sciences. I use to play piano and viola, but was much more active as a singer, in both my high school acapella group as well as my school chorus. Since coming to college, I have stopped being so active in my creative extra-curriculars, but I love listening to music. While I mostly listen to EDM, I enjoy all types of genres including, classical, hip hop, folk, and musicals.

I have always been interested in music production and have tried on my own to learn a couple times, but I had always felt that I was missing some fundamental understanding of digital music production. As a result, I am currently taking this class to explore the area of music production as well as to gain a proper understanding of how digital music is produced.

I can’t wait to see what this class has in store as well as what everyone comes of with!

Hello everyone,

My name is Patrick Mosquera, I am a freshman in CALS and I am an Environmental Science Major. I took this class mainly because and I wanted to try something outside of my comfort zone and I have always been interested in the way music is recorded and created through a computer. As a kid I took some guitar lessons and I enjoy singing in the shower, but that is pretty much the extent of my musical background. I really want to take some more classes related to this topic in the future so hopefully this class points me in the right direction. Mostly I’m excited to learn how to create music using different programs.

Hey all,

My name is Caleb Zhu and I’m a senior Electrical and Computer Engineer. I played the piano for a few years as a child, but my main instrument of choice was the Trombone which I played through middle school and high school, participating in Jazz Bands, Brass Ensemble’s, Chamber Orchestra’s, and Symphonic Orchestra’s. I did not continue playing in College, but still am an avid music listener. At the moment my musical interests lie largely in house music.

I’m enrolled in this class because I want to learn the principles and theory behind producing music and musical sounds of all types. Been trying to get in this class since Sophomore year and finally managed it this semester. Super excited!

Looking forward to hearing all of your creations,

-Caleb

I am a senior in the Hotel School. I played the trumpet in Band from 2nd grade until 12th grade. I pursued musical theater when I was younger. I performed as the lead in an Off-Broadway straight play in New York City called Schooling Giacomo when I was 13 years old. I don’t perform at all now, but I enjoy listening to music at almost all times. One of my favorite things to do with friends and family is go to Music Festivals. I love live music, and I love these new and exciting electric dance music environments. I thought this class would give me good insight into how these artists really do what they do.

hello!
My name is Chris, and I’m a sophomore majoring in Computer Science in Engineering. I have minimal limited musical experience: I took almost a year of classical piano lessons when I was five, and I played trombone in middle school. However, since then, I have been experimenting with chords and improvising to become the self-taught pianist (with lots to learn) I am today. The bulk of my musical experience comes from serving in my church worship team as a keyboardist through middle school and high school. With this, I’ve had the honor of serving at various retreats and other events. On the engineering side of things, I worked as the sound guy for our praise teams as well as children’s ministry and the adults’ service in our main sanctuary. I also worked a lot with Arduinos and other microcontrollers to interface with different sensors and musical instruments and also to make speakers. I’ve produced some basic songs with my friends in the past, but more recently, I’ve been playing around with FL Studio and Audacity, and two midi controllers and a Blue Yeti mic with not much results but growing interest in producing computer music. I look forward to learning a lot from the course and collaborating with my peers this coming semester!

Hi all! My name is Joel Hoover, and I am a senior in Computer Science, with minors in Game Design and Linguistics. My musical background is rather shallow: I self-taught myself a little bit of piano, and composed several songs in both GarageBand and in tracker software (mainly MilkyTracker) over the past few years. I have taken a few music courses at Cornell, namely Elements of Musical Notation (MUSIC 1100) and Music and Digital Gameplay (MUSIC 2701), and I have also taken the intro and advanced game design courses (CS 3152 and CS 4152) where I acted as the Audio Lead, composing music and developing sound effects for my groups games.

I have a few reasons for taking this course. First, I want to better understand the technical aspects of the musical software, such as the theory behind the internal workings of synthesizers. Second, I want to better understand the creative, musical perspective of how such software is used, and more in general how the creative process works for musical compositions (as being self taught and a rather technical person, I have a pretty great gap in my knowledge concerning this). Finally, I want to create some music! I often do not have time anymore to just sit down and create music like I used to, so I will greatly enjoy having this opportunity to create musical compositions, especially after being taught some new techniques!