Digital Sound and Music


Book Description




Digital Sound Studies


Book Description

The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities. Drawing on multiple disciplines—including rhetoric and composition, performance studies, anthropology, history, and information science—the contributors to Digital Sound Studies bring digital humanities and sound studies into productive conversation while probing the assumptions behind the use of digital tools and technologies in academic life. In so doing, they explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive. As they demonstrate, incorporating sound into scholarship is thus not only feasible but urgently necessary. Contributors. Myron M. Beasley, Regina N. Bradley, Steph Ceraso, Tanya Clement, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, W. F. Umi Hsu, Michael J. Kramer, Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Richard Cullen Rath, Liana M. Silva, Jonathan Sterne, Jennifer Stoever, Jonathan W. Stone, Joanna Swafford, Aaron Trammell, Whitney Trettien




Musical Sound Effects


Book Description

For decades performers, instrumentalists, composers, technicians and sound engineers continue to manipulate sound material. They are trying with more or less success to create, to innovate, improve, enhance, restore or modify the musical message. The sound of distorted guitar of Jimi Hendrix, Pierre Henry’s concrete music, Pink Flyod’s rock psychedelic, Kraftwerk ‘s electronic music, Daft Punk and rap T-Pain, have let emerge many effects: reverb, compression, distortion, auto-tune, filter, chorus, phasing, etc. The aim of this book is to introduce and explain these effects and sound treatments by addressing their theoretical and practical aspects.




Digital Signatures


Book Description

How sonically distinctive digital “signatures”—including reverb, glitches, and autotuning—affect the aesthetics of popular music, analyzed in works by Prince, Lady Gaga, and others. Is digital production killing the soul of music? Is Auto-Tune the nadir of creative expression? Digital technology has changed not only how music is produced, distributed, and consumed but also—equally important but not often considered—how music sounds. In this book, Ragnhild Brøvig and Anne Danielsen examine the impact of digitization on the aesthetics of popular music. They investigate sonically distinctive “digital signatures”—musical moments when the use of digital technology is revealed to the listener. The particular signatures of digital mediation they examine include digital reverb and delay, MIDI and sampling, digital silence, the virtual cut-and-paste tool, digital glitches, microrhythmic manipulation, and autotuning—all of which they analyze in specific works by popular artists. Combining technical and historical knowledge of music production with musical analyses, aesthetic interpretations, and theoretical discussions, Brøvig and Danielsen offer unique insights into how digitization has changed the sound of popular music and the listener's experience of it. For example, they show how digital reverb and delay have allowed experimentation with spatiality by analyzing Kate Bush's “Get Out of My House”; they examine the contrast between digital silence and the low-tech noises of tape hiss or vinyl crackle in Portishead's “Stranger”; and they describe the development of Auto-Tune—at first a tool for pitch correction—into an artistic effect, citing work by various hip-hop artists, Bon Iver, and Lady Gaga.




Recording and Producing in the Home Studio


Book Description

(Berklee Methods). With the explosion of project studio gear available, it's easier than ever to create pro-quality music at home. This book is the only reference you'll ever need to start producing and engineering your music or other artists' music in your very own home studio. You don't have a home studio yet, but have some basic equipment? This essential guide will help you set up your studio, begin producing projects, develop your engineering skills and manage your projects. Stop dreaming and start producing!




Creating Digital Music and Sound


Book Description

. Write and record music. Learn studio techniques. Record location sound. Make your own podcasts and Internet radio shows. Add music and sound to videos, movies, and animations. Make music on your cellphone. 'Creating Digital Music and Sound' is an illustrated introduction to the creative challenges and techniques of making music and recording sound digitally, for anyone interested in making, sharing, or publishing music and sound across any media. From the basics of setting up a home studio and using a variety of software and hardware, to practical hints, tips, and creative strategies for adding soundtracks to videos, collaborating online in real time, and making and sharing podcasts and Internet radio shows, this unique book will instruct but also entertain and inspire. 'Creating Digital Music and Sound' also demystifies the technologies and features interviews with top musicians, studio engineers, filmmakers, DJs, Web designers, and videomakers. The book offers a unique insight into the immediate future of music and sound-making, from making music on mobile phones, to digital rights, media players, file formats, and Blu-Ray disks and HD-DVDs. This feature-packed book offers a creative introduction to music and sound making on Mac, PC, Linux and non-computer platforms, from budget tools and freeware to the most comprehensive studio suites.




Alan Parsons' Art & Science of Sound Recording


Book Description

(Technical Reference). More than simply the book of the award-winning DVD set, Art & Science of Sound Recording, the Book takes legendary engineer, producer, and artist Alan Parsons' approaches to sound recording to the next level. In book form, Parsons has the space to include more technical background information, more detailed diagrams, plus a complete set of course notes on each of the 24 topics, from "The Brief History of Recording" to the now-classic "Dealing with Disasters." Written with the DVD's coproducer, musician, and author Julian Colbeck, ASSR, the Book offers readers a classic "big picture" view of modern recording technology in conjunction with an almost encyclopedic list of specific techniques, processes, and equipment. For all its heft and authority authored by a man trained at London's famed Abbey Road studios in the 1970s ASSR, the Book is also written in plain English and is packed with priceless anecdotes from Alan Parsons' own career working with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and countless others. Not just informative, but also highly entertaining and inspirational, ASSR, the Book is the perfect platform on which to build expertise in the art and science of sound recording.




Records Ruin the Landscape


Book Description

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.




Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists


Book Description

Summary Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists: Creating Music with ChucK offers a complete introduction to programming in the open source music language ChucK. In it, you'll learn the basics of digital sound creation and manipulation while you discover the ChucK language. As you move example-by-example through this easy-to-follow book, you'll create meaningful and rewarding digital compositions and "instruments" that make sound and music in direct response to program logic, scores, gestures, and other systems connected via MIDI or the network. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About this Book A digital musician must manipulate sound precisely. ChucK is an audio-centric programming language that provides precise control over time, audio computation, and user interface elements like track pads and joysticks. Because it uses the vocabulary of sound, ChucK is easy to learn even for artists with little or no exposure to computer programming. Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists offers a complete introduction to music programming. In it, you'll learn the basics of digital sound manipulation while you learn to program using ChucK. Example-by-example, you'll create meaningful digital compositions and "instruments" that respond to program logic, scores, gestures, and other systems connected via MIDI or the network. You'll also experience how ChucK enables the on-the-fly musical improvisation practiced by communities of "live music coders" around the world. Written for readers familiar with the vocabulary of sound and music. No experience with computer programming is required. What's Inside Learn ChucK and digital music creation side-by-side Invent new sounds, instruments, and modes of performance Written by the creators of the ChucK language About the Authors Perry Cook, Ajay Kapur, Spencer Salazar, and Ge Wang are pioneers in the area of teaching and programming digital music. Ge is the creator and chief architect of the ChucK language. Table of Contents Introduction: ChucK programming for artistsPART 1 INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING IN CHUCK Basics: sound, waves, and ChucK programming Libraries: ChucK's built-in tools Arrays: arranging and accessing your compositional data Sound files and sound manipulation Functions: making your own tools PART 2 NOW IT GETS REALLY INTERESTING! Unit generators: ChucK objects for sound synthesis and processing Synthesis ToolKit instruments Multithreading and concurrency: running many programs at once Objects and classes: making your own ChucK power tools Events: signaling between shreds and syncing to the outside world Integrating with other systems via MIDI, OSC, serial, and more




The Sound of Innovation


Book Description

How a team of musicians, engineers, computer scientists, and psychologists developed computer music as an academic field and ushered in the era of digital music. In the 1960s, a team of Stanford musicians, engineers, computer scientists, and psychologists used computing in an entirely novel way: to produce and manipulate sound and create the sonic basis of new musical compositions. This group of interdisciplinary researchers at the nascent Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, pronounced “karma”) helped to develop computer music as an academic field, invent the technologies that underlie it, and usher in the age of digital music. In The Sound of Innovation, Andrew Nelson chronicles the history of CCRMA, tracing its origins in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory through its present-day influence on Silicon Valley and digital music groups worldwide. Nelson emphasizes CCRMA's interdisciplinarity, which stimulates creativity at the intersections of fields; its commitment to open sharing and users; and its pioneering commercial engagement. He shows that Stanford's outsized influence on the emergence of digital music came from the intertwining of these three modes, which brought together diverse supporters with different aims around a field of shared interest. Nelson thus challenges long-standing assumptions about the divisions between art and science, between the humanities and technology, and between academic research and commercial applications, showing how the story of a small group of musicians reveals substantial insights about innovation. Nelson draws on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with digital music pioneers; the book's website provides access to original historic documents and other material.