Intellectual Impropriety Electronic Music Composition Workshop GAFFTA 2010

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Composing and recycling music: how far can sampling lead you? Can you be original through plagiarism?

Description: The goal of this 2-day weekend intensive workshop is to give students a basic practical understanding of (mainly Open Source) tools and techniques for the composition of sample-based electronic music. Hands on labs are interleaved with critical discussion on various topics surrounding the practice of sample-based composition: notions of ownership in music; alternatives to copyright such as Creative Commons and Copyleft; and the constant presence of musical borrowing throughout music history. Sampling will be discussed in its widest possible musical definition, including how it may change the nature of musical creativity and how it is affecting a wider culture.

The workshop is of an experimental nature: departing from your own musical background, you will be encouraged to creatively question underlying musical assumptions and to explore original (!) ways of composing music through the use of existing music. This workshop is intended for: beginners to intermediate level students. You don’t have to have any prior experience with the software. No music theory background necessary. Please bring headphones. This workshop is designed for Mac or Linux users (unfortunately some applications used in this workshop are not available on Windows).

Workshop structure: The schedule will consist of short lectures followed by lab sessions. Participants will work on their own laptops to complete hands-on assignments and exercises. By the end of the workshop you will have a basic practical understanding of the fundamental operations of Audacity (sound editor), Ardour (digital audio workstation), and Pd and/or MaxMSP (graphical programming languages), with particular emphasis on the technique of concatenative synthesis (CataRT and timbreID). You will use these programs to compose a very short miniature which will be presented in class at the end of the weekend. An e-mail with software installation links and instructions will be sent to students in advance, having applications installed and tested will leave more time for creativity!

Software installation instructions can be found here:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~ruviaro/gaffta_composition_workshop_pre-installat.pdf

Schedule

Day 1
Lecture/Lab 1: Audacity - Basic operations - Collage and montage techniques - Working with multiple tracks - Effects Lecture/Lab 2: Ardour - Intro to Ardour & JACK - Overview of the interface - Edit window and mixer window - Starting a session - Creating tracks or busses - Importing audio - Working with regions Lecture/Lab 3: More Ardour - Basic recording operations - Volume automation - Using plug-ins - Understanding routing

Day 2
Lecture/Lab 4: MaxMSP and Pd - Introduction to MaxMSP and Pd - Simple granulation patch - Concatenative synthesis - Catork: a CataRT skin/interface for composition and performance - Recording the results Lecture/Lab 5: Connecting all the dots - Composing with borrowed samples: common issues (notions of ownership in music, alternatives to copyright such as Creative Commons and Copyleft) - Choosing and editing samples - Transforming and “recycling” your samples via concatenative synthesis - Performing/improvising with your samples - Composing your miniature in Ardour


tags: acousmatics ardour Audacity collage composition concatenative synthesis concrete music electroacoustic music electronic music intellectual property Max/MSP montage musical borrowing pd plugins plunderphonics sampling