Music
255 - Winter 2002
cd usr/cc
Instructor: Jonathan Berger
Teaching assistants: Randal Leistikow, Unjung Nam
Course Goals
The goals of this course are to:
Required skills
It is assumed that you have music theory skills at the level of music 22 or beyond.
In addition, by the end of the course you will be expected to know the mechanics of
sound production and control of each orchestral instrument. Proficiency in notation,
particularly
as relavent to orchestration, is also expected.
Course Syllabus
vagueries of common music notation of timbre
developing terminology for timbre description
frequency domain
issues of time and frequency domain resolution-
performer limitations
economics of the orchestra
repeatability
constraints of the performing space
analysis of Mahler's reorchestrations
functions
plotting
audio I/O
Refinements of the FFT - windowing, filtering
windowing
filters
the spectrogram and sonogram
Analyzing the human voice - Cepstral analysis - MFCC
Replicating the human voice
vowels and consonants
synthetized voices
orchestrated voices - project goals
diracs and glissandi
Orchestra
readings: March 6th
The
final project will involve synthesizing the techniques and skills acquired
in the class with an orchestration excercise that will be read by the Stanford
Symphony on March 6 2002.
The
excercise will involve making the orchestra 'speak' a text by applying
principles of vowel production and spectral analysis to find close approximations
between orchestral sounds and specific consonants and vowels.