Professor Miller Puckette , CRCA room 7, 534-4823
E-mail: msp@ucsd.edu web: https://www.msp.ucsd.edu/

TENTATIVE MEETING TIME: Fridays, 12:00-1:30

This course is intended for graduate music students interested in getting acquainted with some popular electronic techniques without getting into too many technical details. I'm hoping to look at nine important pieces in the electronic music repertory and try to build tools that imitate some important aspect of each one:

A tentative list of pieces (and techniques):
Risset, Duet for One Pianist (MIDI transformation)
Stockhausen, Mantra (ring modulation)
Tenney, Collage #1 (classic montage)
Reich, Come Out (tape loops)
Chowning, Turenas (microtonal scales)
Harvey, Mortuous Plango, Vivos Voco (sinusoidal analysis/additive synthesis)
Manoury, Pluton (several real-time audio processing techniques)
Boulez, Dialogue de l'Ombre Double (spatialization)
Yuasa, Toward the Midnight Sun (filtering)

Each week but the last we'll listen to one piece (well, I'll just play extracts from Mantra which is an hour or so long!) Then I'll show you how you can explore some of the effects accomplished in the piece using a collection of "courseware" I'll be hacking into shape. My intention isn't so much to teach you how to put together computer applications as to invite exploration of applications that are already put together. At the end of the quarter you should have a reasonably broad view of what techniques are "out there" and be ready to explore more deeply the ones which you would like to use in your own work.

The term assignment is to choose one of the examples and write a short musical sketch based on it.

Practical stuff

If you're interested in attending but can't make it Fridays at noon, write me and I'll try to reschedule. If you haven't already done so, you'll need to get an ACS account and B104 door code.

We will use the Mandeville B104 concert machine . In principle you can also run the courseware at home if you have a reasonably fast PC compatible computer running Windows 98, NT, or Linux, although you should allow a couple of weeks to sort out practical difficulties.