Dartmouth Graduate Program in Electro-Acoustic Music

The relationship of composers and performers to their cultural past and to their present opportunities to be heard have shaped the style and content of musical expression in the Western world during the past three hundred years. Radio and recordings have altered the relationship among mass, folk and art cultures. This seminar is concerned with these issues and with new technological developments which will have an equally powerful effect on musical culture.

There exists a body of art music that has not been widely heard because its radical style and content do not make it a commodity for the most frequent channels of music distribution. Knowing and understanding this repertoire is essential to creative work in the field. In this seminar students will systematically examine the repertoire of electro-acoustic and computer music.

Digital music systems offer a dynamic control over timbre that is unprecedented in music history. This seminar explores a number of theoretical approaches to the multiple variables that comprise musical timbre. The course begins with a brief review of basic musical acoustics and psychoacoustics. Approaches to the electro-acoustic simulation of instrumental and vocal timbres are discussed and demonstrated. These studies serve to introduce principles that can be freely applied to the synthesis of any imaginable timbre. Coursework will include a number of musical exercises and studies that focus upon aspects of timbre and timbre theory.

Music 104 will consist of a series of short assignments which explore different compositional forms. The emphasis in this class will be on doing a lot of different work, and in talking about it. Composers in the class will be required to complete their pieces under rather strict deadlines. In addition, we will establish a class website where each piece will be documented.

A seminar in techniques of composition for electro-acoustic instruments. Some insights into the structure of music can only be gained through the activity of composition itself. Those individuals with primarily scientific backgrounds are most in need of this experience if they are to make significant contributions to the tools musicians use. Compositional exercises are designed to explore widely divergent contemporary musical materials, textures and forms. Recent systems employed in this seminar include the Synclavier Digital Audio System, Digidesign software, and musical software developed for Macintosh and NeXT computer systems.

Interaction design encompasses a wide range of technical and theoretical topics and concepts. We'll be addressing issues that are specifically pertinent to musical applications, with an emphasis on phenomenological and cognitive factors in human performance. Topics include: Microcontrollers: architecture, programming, input and output protocols; Sensors and Actuators: electrical principles, gesture acquisition, signal conditioning, feature extraction, haptics; Interface Metaphors: theories of interaction, computation and representation, cognitive steering, mapping strategies; Human Factors: physical and cognitive constraints, affordances and intentionality, embodied agency, multimodal coordination dynamics, adaptive control, skill acquisition; Design: design strategies and scenarios, usability metrics and heuristics, pattern languages.

Music 104 will consist of a series of short assignments which explore different compositional forms. The emphasis in this class will be on doing a lot of different work, and in talking about it. Composers in the class will be required to complete their pieces under rather strict deadlines. In addition, we will establish a class website where each piece will be documented.

This term's Music 104, graduate composition seminar will be a series of, generally, 1-week assignments, each focussing on a specific topic.Four of the assignments will be designed by the second-year graduate students, related to their own thesis work, and they will introduce these as assignments by giving a "talk" on their work (which might or might not be similar to their graduate orals, but should be more or less what one would give if invited somewhere to talk for an hour about one's work).

The music and work of Ruth Crawford Seeger and John Cage. Each an essential, singular, and fascinating force in 20th century music. Half the course will be on Crawford Seeger, half on Cage. We'll study their music, writings, and writings about them. The class will be in seminar form, with students doing weekly presentations on specific works. In addition, we'll end up by doing a concert of the two composers' works.

This class will focus on student research and compositional projects, each exploring a different, current topic in formal descriptions, theories, explications, and speculations of musical thought and practice. We will focus on general theoretical ideas which are or might be used to describe and/or create music, and which lend themselves to computer music implementations. Each student will be assigned to lead the discussion on one of the topics, focusing on the readings, asking specific questions, and essentially, leading the seminar as the instructor. The intent of this is to offer some practical teaching experience in this context, as well as to try and get everyone involved in the subject matter as deeply as possible. For each topic, that student will be asked to prepare a kind of "take-home" set of questions about the readings and the topic, which all the other students will complete. In addition to the readings, students will do three software-based research and composition projects, accompanied by written documentation of the theoretical ideas explored, relating to the selected topics.

This course explores computer music synthesis and analysis, from the angles of DSP theory and software design/implementation issues and strategies. We will discuss digital signal processing concepts and their practical applications in sound synthesis. We'll also go over (and practice) important software design principles, and write lots of cool code. Additional emphases include software reuse, real-time systems, and designing interactive software. Programming will primarily be in C++ and Java, with additional uses of MATLAB and other environments and languages.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the art of composition using the electro-acoustic medium. The course will survey the history, theory, practice and technology of electro-acoustic music with an emphasis on creative composition. Students will compose four projects of different character during the term. Topics to be covered include musical acoustics and psychoacoustics and principles of digital sound and synthesis. Upon successful completion of Music 24, students will have full access to the Hopkins Center Electronic Music Studio (BritTrax).