Week 2

Sound Breaking

Early synthesizer players came from a classical organ playing background.
Mixcraft - garageband for windows.
Digital audio and recording 

Loops are a particular type of digital 

Very versatile

Change tempo without changing pitch

Change pitch without changing tempo

12 bar blues often used for middle school classes.

People in the 1800s either had to go to a performance or learn to play an instrument. 

1800s ways to hear music

Performance

Playing an instrument yourself

Music box 

Player piano

orchestrion 

Pat Metheny Orchestrion

Thomas Eddison gramophone 

Capturing sound wave energy and storing it on a wax cylinder 

Captured sound using a long cone

Moved to wax discs (vinyl records)

Magnetic tape

Began with large rotating reels of thin steel 

Became reels of plastic with a thin coating 

8 track 

Tape deck 

1980s

Personal computer technology 

CDs 

Record audio digitally and store on CD

2000s 

Internet and file sharing websites cost the recording industry lots of money 

People can record and distribute on the internet themselves

Billie Eilish recorded album in her house and distributed on streaming services 

Sampling rate: snapshots of sound over time. (like fps on camera) 24 fps vs 44,000 

Bit depth: sampling width

Nyquist theorem: helps determine the affect of sampling rate on the quality of the digital audio. States that the rate we use for sampling audio must be twice as high as the usable frequency we need.

Dynamic range or signal-to-noise ratio: how sampling width affects the quality of the digital audio process. The usable dynamic range is a function of the sampling width. Similar to Signal to noise ratio. The larger the ratio the less likely rounding errors will be detectable by the human ear.

Aliasing: unwanted sounds that may be audible in the output

New form of composition: Musique Concret 

Faithful and unfaithful reproduction of sound 

Manipulating tape 

People began recording any sound and then manipulating it 

Audacity 

Normalize: makes sound as loud as possible

This week while diving deeper into recording jargon, we learned about using loops in soundtrap. I've never fooled around with loops before but they seem to be a very useful tool. It allows for a lot of flexibility and creativity in composition. It seems like it could be useful in the classroom to teach kids about harmonic progressions in the same way we used it to learn the blues. Each student can engage with the form creatively by changing feels/timbres and it requires no technical skill on an instrument to do so. One barrier for children learning a blues progression would be the actual ability to play each chord in the correct order. The loop feature gets rid of that barrier.

I think this would be useful for a middle school general music classroom. If it were an instrumental class I would have the students actually learn to play the blues, but if the goal is for the kids to learn the form, this is great way. It might also be good in a composition class. This made me think, "Why would we be teaching the blues to a class that won't actually play the blues?" I suppose it would be beneficial for all students to know the blues because of its historic value, but I can't think of a larger learning objective. Learning forms is a good idea, but in my opinion it is better to use form as a vehicle to break down large/complicated ideas in order to understand them. I'm not sure if making a loop of the form is completely necessary for that. For discussion of the music concrete project, see my Musique Concrete post.