MUSI 3450 Short/Long Answers

Simon Fraser University - R. Murray Schafer

Sonic Research Studio

Dartmouth- John Appleton (originally = Griffith)

Bregman Electronic Music Studio

ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) envelopes play an important role in the perceived naturalness of sound. These envelopes can be applied to volume, filters, and pitch.

ADSR envelopes

A sound synthesis technique adding together sine waves to create more complex waveforms. This Synthesis is also known as Fourier Synthesis due to the timbre of musical instruments consisting of multiple harmonic or inharmonic overtones. Additive Synthesis uses more oscillators than Subtractive Synthesis.

Additive Synthesis

Conlon Nancarrow was born in America but lived most of his life in Mexico due to his firm belief in the Communist Party. He was best known for his Player Piano pieces and punched in the holes manually for the Player Pianos. In addition, Conlon was one of the first composers to use instruments as mechanical machines. He was well known for his Study No. 31 which was completed in the 1960s and used canon as a compositional technique for his pieces from Studies for Player Piano.

Conlon Nancarrow

This Synthesis is a method of generating complex musical waveforms using one waveform to increase or decrease the frequency of another. The inventor of FM Synthesis was John Chowning at Stanford University. This process typically uses sine waves, but other waveforms can be used such as a square, triangle, or sawtooth. FM Synthesis also creates new frequencies often with very "musical" properties. The Yamaha DX-7 was the most famous FM Synthesizer.

FM Synthesis

Georgia Tech - Gil Weinberg and Jason Freeman

GTCMT

This synthesis is based on the production of a high density of small acoustic events called "grains" that are less than 50 ms in duration. The first implementation of real-time granular synthesis was developed by Barry Traux and used a sample as the source of a granular composition in the Wings of Nike.

Granular Synthesis

This synthesis uses many thousands of very short, overlapping sound bursts or "grains" which are then redistributed and reorganized to form other sounds. The waveforms of these grains are usually less than 100 milliseconds and frequently seen as sine waves, although any waveform can be used. Waveforms in this process can be pre-recorded or captured live. Complex sounds can be created with granular synthesis by manipulating the temporal placement of large numbers of grains and their respective frequencies, amplitude envelopes, and waveshapes.

Granular Synthesis

Centre Pompidou (Paris) - Pierre Boulez (founder)

IRCAM

He was an American composer, philosopher, and poet. He was a pioneer of Chance Music and electronic music. He composed aleatory music, which is a notion of chance or unpredictability and is well known for his composition 4'33". In addition, he was well known for his "prepared piano" pieces in which he put different material into pianos to produce various sounds. This was used to demonstrate that in some way or form, music can be anything.

John Cage

This involves performers writing, modifying, and executing code in real-time. In this process, coders expose and rewire the innards of software while it generates improvised music and visuals. An example of which is a Study in Keith.

Live Coding

He is one of the founding fathers of computer and electronic music. He invented the Radio Baton and Conductor Program and worked at Bell Labs. He also created pieces titled "Music" in which he added function libraries, synthesis generators, and scores.

Max Matthews

MIR is the science of retrieving information from music. The tools and techniques of MIR can greatly enhance the recommender systems and provides an algorithmic analysis of music. MIR can be used in real time or offline and can as an example query by humming through its sample applications. In addition to this MIR can be used to detect musical features such as a beat or chord, and identify music. In addition to this, it relates and interacts with digital signal processing, music theory, and machine learning as an interdisciplinary field.

Music Information Retrieval

The manner in which musicians are connected to each other becomes integral to the work they create. This includes having traditional, aural, and visual connections amongst musicians. Almost all music in this way is networked. The three specific areas of this practice are shared sonic environments, collaborative composition systems, and laptop orchestra. Max Neuhaus and Freeman are popular musicians who use this practice.

Networked Music

The process of generating sounds through mathematical models emulating the physical characteristics, construction, and behavior of certain instruments. This process directly models the sound mechanism instead of the sound itself and does not interpret the sound in the time and frequency domain.

Physical Modeling

Reverb in the time domain has the ability to delay a signal for some number of times, feedback onto itself, simulating the way a sound bounces in a room or other environment. Reverb and delays can be used to simulate room and other environmental acoustics or to create new sounds not necessarily tied to existing physical spaces. Some types of reverb include hall, room, chamber, plate, and spring.

Reverb

The goal is to combine human qualities, such as expression and emotions, with robotic traits such as powerful processing, the ability to perform sophisticated mathematical transformations, robust long-term memory, and the ability to play accurately without practice. Examples of Robotic Musicianship include Shimon and Skywalker.

Robotic Musicianship

Also known as Formant Synthesis, it is a special case of subtractive synthesis. Formants are fixed frequency peaks which are part of what makes the timbre of a voice or instrument consistent over a wide range of frequencies. This is a complicated process that was emulated in the piece Notjustmoreidlechatter.

Speech Synthesis

This synthesis is a method of sound synthesis in which partials of an audio signal are attenuated by a filter to alter the timbre of the sound. Subtractive synthesis starts with a complex sound and filters out parts of it .

Subtractive Synthesis

This was the most famous FM synthesizer. This keyboard was able to bring FM synthesis to the general public due in part to it being affordable.

The Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer

This synthesis is a method for generating sounds from signals of a digital nature. The technique stores digital sound samples from various sources, which can later be modified, enhanced or combined for reproducing sounds. Wavetable synthesis is considered one of the oldest methods for generating sounds from computers. Wavetable synthesis is widely used in many areas such as in production of sinusoidal signals.

Wavetable Synthesis

Simon Fraser University - R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp

World Soundscape Project