music composition
loops
traditional methods
remixing
MIDI
sound synthesis
the groove

film production

Skills

Music production is comprised of many activities including performing, composing, arranging, audio engineering, sound synthesis, remixing, video editing, and media distribution.  The average high school student has listened to thousands of  hours of music in his lifetime, but rarely given a chance to apply that knowledge. 

Music Composition

The computer allows you to approach composition from many angles.  You can focus on forms and structures, or manipulate individual sounds and phrases.  Computers have replaced tape in multi-track audio recording.

Loops

One approach to composing is through sound loops. A loop is a chunk of sound, or a musical phrase.  Software like Sonic Foundry's Acid Pro allows you to arrange and organize many tracks of  loops, and any other recorded sounds,  into compositions.  Its like building with Lego, or  plywood.  Where do loops come from? Anywhere that you can find sound.  If you click on the student Web pages below, you'll also discover that they're learning to make their own plywood.  Check out Greg Bryant's original beat-box loops and the way Burt Boyer makes poetry out of poetry.

Traditional Methods

Musicians who work with standard musical notation can use software like Coda Music's Finale to write scores and lead sheets.  Musicians with keyboard skills can record the sounds of many instruments using MIDI (see below).  Performing musicians can use the computer as a recording studio. 

Remixing

Remixing is like cooking - except that you use cooked food as ingredients. There's as much skill in finding the right ingredients as in knowing what to do with them. Teppei Ishida uses sound effects, recorded conversations, and the sounds of machines in his compositions.   Josh Liebowitz uses the sound of his own guitar.  Stuart Klanfer entered his Jungle Brothers remix in a recent contest at Acidplanet.com

MIDI

 MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.  Its a standard that allows musical keyboards, sound modules, computers, and many other devices to communicate with each other. With a MIDI keyboard and and sequencing software like Cakewalk Pro Audio you can record multiple tracks of music, using synthesized sounds to simulate other instruments.    

Sound Synthesis

What does a computer sound like? Check out the work of Josh Liebowitz. He's building sounds using CSOUND, a computer language, developed at the MIT media lab.

The Groove

What good is it if you can't dance to it? James Baxendale, Chris Buckley, Todd Chasteen, and Stuart Klanfer will have you leaping out of your cubicle.  If you like electric guitar, you'll want to hear what Sung Ha Park is up to.

Film Production 

The computer allows you to combine clips of video and audio in a non-linear fashion using transitions and special effects. It takes many many hours to produce a few minutes of video. Check out the work of Rory Will,  in the Gould lumberjack team video.  Todd Chasteen produced a documentary about professional wrestling at Gould.  Adam Stout produces music videos using clips collected from various Internet sites.  Over the next few months we'll be adding several skiing and snowboarding videos to this site.  Students have use Adobe Premiere and Sonic Foundry Videofactory to produce films.

.Software like Microsoft Power-point allows you to build slide shows containing music, sound, text, and narration.  Check out some of the work from the recent Gould Academy sophomore four-point project.