This course is intended for graduate students wanting to get acquainted with a range of electronic music possibilities without getting too deeply into details. We'll look at nine important pieces in the electronic music repertory. In some cases we look at an implementation of the entire piece; for others, a study 'patch' demonstrates the techniques used.

A tentative list of pieces (and techniques):

Chowning, Turenas (microtonal scales)
Risset, Duet for One Pianist (MIDI transformation)
Stockhausen, Mantra (ring modulation)
Tenney, Collage #1 (classic montage)
Harvey, Mortuous Plango, Vivos Voco (sinusoidal analysis/additive synthesis)
Manoury, Pluton (several real-time audio processing techniques)
Boulez, Dialogue de l'Ombre Double (spatialization)
Steiger, 13 loops (using instrumental ensembles)
Yuasa, Toward the Midnight Sun (graphical score notation)

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

Practical stuff

Experimentally in 2007 I'll try using the macintosh computers in B104; in the past we used a linux machine I had set up for the purpose. Here's a guide on how to use the Mandeville B104 studio . Stay tuned for updates.

Alternatively, you can download the patches to run them on your own machine, Mac, PC, or linux. To do this, get version 0.41 of Pd (available as a preliminary release on https://msp.ucsd.edu/software.html -- be sure not to get the older version 0.40. Then get the PDRP patches from: https://msp.ucsd.edu/pdrp/latest/ . Get the zip file for a PC or the ".tgz" for a macintosh.

Here is documentation for the patches.