Earlham Music Technology
"Composing with Computers"
Composing with Computers teaches current computer software within the context of computer music history. In the class, the student will learn to work with four primary software programs:
1. Logic, by Apple. This is a Digital Audio Workstation that I find to be a wonderful teaching tool. Once you work with Logic in this class, you'll be able to switch over to any other DAW that might suit you in the future: Pro Tools, Cuebase, Ableton Live, etc. They are all variations on a theme. What I like about Logic Pro is that it runs very efficiently on the Mac (I had terribly experiences with Pro Tools LE on the Mac some years back), and its interface is clean and transparent. So, Logic it is.
2. Reason, by Propellerhead (of Sweden). Reason is a software synthesis package that emulates the setup of the historical computer music studio, with racks of gear that you connect with patch chords. I love this approach for this class, since it gives you a feeling for the history of computer music while affording you unlimited synthesizer technology. Again, once you learn reason, you'll be able to work with any other synthesis packages on the market.
3. Sibelius/Finale. We won't do alot with notation software in this class, since it's really something you just teach yourself as you go. But we will look under the hood and focus primarily on how to get good sound out of these packages, since for composers you often will be requested to submit a score along with a MIDI realization. We'll explore how possible it is to get that to sound good.
4. Max/MSP. Max and "Max Signal Processing" is the most serious and demanding program that you will likely ever work with. It's really an object-oriented programming language and you will get a feeling for computer programming as well as direct experience in working with digital audio and signal processing. Max is taught widely in academia. All students of computer music must learn Max. We will get started.
Schedule
The link above will take you to our assignment schedule. As of this writing, 10 January, I'm keeping things a bit fluid, since we are a small class and I can partially tailor things towards your interest. At the same time, there are definitely some things I feel we should cover to get a good grounding in the field.