FreeSound.Org is a good website for downloading copyright-free sounds that are often suitable for use in your own musique concrète project.
The Arts Media Center has some sound effects CDs in its collection, too.
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Online introduction to computer music
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The online Introduction to Computer Music: Volume One by Jeffrey Hass is a pretty clear and concise text. As supplemental reading for the first week of this class, you might want to look at “Chapter 1: An Acoustics Primer” (which I’ve already recommended in an earlier post) and “Chapter 5: Digital Audio“.
Binary number representation
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Computers calculate all numbers using binary representation, which means using only two digits: 0 and 1. If you’re not experienced with binary numbers, you might want to take a look at an online lesson on Representation of Numbers by Erik Cheever. Read at least the first two sections — “Introduction” and “Binary representation of positive integers”. (Keep reading beyond that if your brain can handle it.)
For the discussion of quantization of digital audio in this class, a key sentence in that lesson is “With n digits, 2n unique numbers (from 0 to 2n-1) can be represented. If n=8, 256 (=28) numbers can be represented 0-255.” How many different numbers can be represented by 16 digits? (The answer is provided right there on that page.)
The Decibel
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If you want to read more about decibels, here’s a pretty good article explaining The Decibel as it’s used to discuss sounds in the real world. (The same principles apply when talking about digital audio, except that the 0 dB reference amplitude in digital audio is usually the greatest amplitude the system can produce, rather than the softest sound we can hear.)
Audacity tutorial videos
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UCI music professor Michael Dessen prepared two tutorial videos for his Music 3 class demonstrating how to perform some of the basic recording and editing functions of Audacity. The videos are available on YouTube and are called “Audio Assign 1” and “Audio Assign 2“.
An Acoustics Primer
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An Acoustics Primer by Jeffrey Hass is good supplemental reading material for the first week.
How Hearing Works
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“How Hearing Works” by Tom Harris explains the human auditory system in six brief web pages.
MuLab
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MuLab, free cross-platform music composition/production software
Audacity
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Audacity, free cross-platform audio recording/editing software
Software
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The following applications are required for this class:
Audacity, free cross-platform audio recording/editing software
MuLab, free cross-platform music composition/production software
Audacity and MuLab Free are available in these labs:
Arts Media Center, AITRC 290, M-Th 11am-3pm
Digital Arts Teaching Lab, CAC 3006, MW 9am-9pm, TTh 12pm-9pm, F 9am-5pm
Headphones are supplied at the Arts Media Center. You will need to bring your own headphones or earbuds with a 1/8″ stereo plug to use in the Digital Arts Teaching Lab.
Other free computer music programs of interest include:
Csound, a free text-based computer music synthesis programming environment
Pure Data (Pd), a free graphical computer music programming environment
ChucK, a free realtime computer audio programming language