Digital Art/Digital Media - Theory and Practice
RTF 344M, FA360, FA 381
Dr. Bruce Pennycook; Marianela Vega (TA)
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Class Notes #7

Music, Sound & MIDI - Software

Sound Editors

The analog signals that represent sound can be recorded and stored on various kinds of media - usually tape. Recording tape consists of a spool of plastic that is coated with a substance containing small particles of iron. These tiny particles can be magnetized when passed over the "record head" through "induction". The electrical current in the record head changes proportionally to the sound signal and causes variable magnetization of the particles. When played back, these tiny magnetic fields cause an induction in the "play head" that in turn, produces proportional changes in electric current. The technologies of tape recording reached their peak in the 1980's with companies such as Studer and Sony making very high quality multi-track tape recorders for the professional recording industry.

While we rarely encounter audio tape recorders now, the process of accurately recording, editing and assembling music into a finished track or a complete record was accomplished by very skilled personnel. In radio the process of getting the tapes from the interviews or shows and editing these into the segments for "on air" playback was a meticulous and time consuming job. Here is a brief look at how tape was edited: tape editing

Today we use digital recording technologies. From the simple "audio in" to the recorder in your PC or Mac to large-scale hard-disk recording systems with many audio channels. The cost of these devices has been falling - like all digital technology. For example, a very high quality 24-track recorder today costs less than $2000 compared to the venerable Studer 24-track tape deck which, when new, cost $80-100,000.

Editing of audio is now accomplished entirely in software. For example, here are some screenshots of widely used products:

Acoustica:

Cool Edit (winxp)

 

MIDI Sequencers

The first commercial computer music software were simple 'MIDI Sequencers' that provided a means to play and record MIDI then edit and playback the data to your keyboard synthesizer. These early sequencers quickly evolved into complex programs complete with music notation and a wide variety of musical processing tools to simplify the construction of large-scale pieces.

Below is a simple MIDI sequencer- Cakewalk Express - that operates much like the earliest versions. Note that you can enter and edit lyrics and musical notation along with the "piano-roll" midi data tracks (blue, yellow, red).

All of these products have three fundamental elements:

Cakewalk Express - easy, entry-level. Home "songwriter" target.

 

This outline gives you a good step-by-step guide to making a MIDI sequenced piece. It also points to a wide variety of other useful software.

Audio and MIDI Integrated Sequencing and Mixing

Today, nearly all professional editing and sequencing software includes the ability to record and edit audio tracks in sync with MIDI and video. There are many fine products on the market such as Apple's Logic Pro (shown below) for OS-X and SONY Vegas. The integration of nearly every operation of the recording studio into these complex production platforms has transformed the way in which all commercial music is composed and ultimately presented and as a finished product.

A very important feature of all these programs is the capacity to utilize third-party plugins. A plug-in is a piece of software that does not operate on its own but ads specialized functionality to the "host" program. We are all familiar with plugins for the web and programs like Photoshop. In the audio domain there are similar collections of plugins that perform audio-specific functions such as filtering, equalization, reverb, etc. Perhaps the best know packages are from a company called waves.

Logic Pro 7 (high-end)

 

It is not possible or practical to explore all types of audio mixing software and hardware that is on the market. However, we will examine briefly the most widely used "audio platform" in the RTF world and in most recording studios - Digidesign ProTools as show below. ProTools (a division of AVID, the most widely used pro-video editing platform) is both hardware and software - meaning you cannot really run ProTools without a minimum audio interface connected to your computer. At the high end, ProTools systems are racks of pro-audio quality hardware for real-time "hard disk recording" that can span 96 channels or more.

Anyone anticipating a career in audio or audio for tv/video/film etc. will sooner or later have to master ProTools. As with the other software packages, this system can be fully automated and can be augmented with countless audio signal processing plugins.

Systems like Pro Tools for recording and editing and Logic for music creation are standard tools of the audio industry. Combined with sophisticated midi-controlled "control surfaces" that replace conventional recording consoles and mixing desks these all digital audio recording systems now dominate the entire spectrum of audio recording and processing.

Loop Based Music Systems

We will undertake a small project using "loop" software, either Garage Band or ACID. The details of the project are below.

This software grew out of the "electronica" or "techno" genre of music where "samples" of other music - from LP or CD or wherever - were copied, modified and looped or repeated by some technical means. A google search on "music loops" produced 1,740,000 results showing how pervasive this method of music making has become.

Why? Partly because we can. Recall that music and audio editors are made of three key parts: the tape recorder metaphor, the word processor metaphor and the music or audio specific operations. Thus, recording, editing, copying and pasting multiple copies of a short segment of MIDI data or audio signals is a fairly simple task. Samplers that were used initially just to play individual notes of a given instrument could just as easily play whole passages of music with a single key-stroke on the synthesizer or controller. Consider also that the dance/rave/trance movement emerged in parallel with this genre hence an aesthetic or at least a wildly popular cultural force drove the technology (and vice-versa).

How does this work? The computer specific part is the essential part here. Each loop must conform to the tempo (normally in beats-per-minute such BPM=120) and to the key of the song. Using just an audio editor it is very tricky to get all the short segments to line up just right on the beat and to sound as if they are all in the same key and style. The earliest techno pieces were made by careful and painstaking editing and fitting. Now we have specialized software that handles the tricky problems of timing, tempo, key and "fit".

Acid (winxp) by Sony and Garageband (OS-X) by Apple have been wildly popular. At first these were targeted toward the techno composers. Now they are being used for TV, film, pop songs, ambient music and on and on.

You do not need any musical training to use these programs. Is this a good thing? As a trained musician and composer it is impossible for me to answer objectively. But I cannot help but observe the explosive acceptance of the means (technology, infinite sources of samples) and the styles (countless net-radio stations, raves, party music, hip-hop, bass-drum, etc, etc.). I have no idea where all this is leading.

In the language of Lev Manovich, this is truly a "new media". Considering some of the principles from lesson #4, this type of music making is:

Garage Band (Apple OSX)

 

Sony Media Software - ACID

 

General Features

Some Useful Links:

The History of Sound Recording Technology
http://www.recording-history.org/

Garage Band Resources

Assignment/Project #2: Music and Audio

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