Week 2

Class Note - 

 

Class discussion about our Canon In D project from last week. 


Digital Audio - today’s focal topic.


How music was made and transformed - 


What did you have to do to have music? (i.e. hundred years ago)

  1. Hire musicians to play. 

  2. To be considered an educated person, you needed to learn music. 

  3. If you like one piece of music, one needs to have someone to write it down. 

  4. Still, someone needed to play it.


Technology helps playing music without a musician. 

  • Music Box - Thumb piano, Time (bars?) 

  • Player Piano  - Mechanic ones: with piano roll inside. Digital ones.

  • Mid 1800, Thomas Edison created a device that (enabled us to) capture(s) sound with something - Wax cylinder - Phonograph. Cylinder

  • Record

  • 8 track tapes

  • Cassette tapes

  • Affordable computers - in the late 70’,  80’, so Compact Disc was born.

  • Digital format music was born, due to the music quality/fidelity decrease hen copied. 

  • Compressed files. File sharing - Napster: a platform for people to share mp3 files.

  • Copy protection then was invented, to protect musicians and copyright. 

  • Streaming music - leads to streaming platforms: Spotify, Google Music, ...etc. Artists get paid very little for streaming service. (e.g. 1 cent for each stream.) = inequality for artists in music streaming. 

  • Music has become a commodity for people. 


Analog vs. Digital
-Analog sound can be represented as  a continuous range of values. This can be seen in the motion of a speaker cone.

-Or, in the grooves of a record. The needle bounces along the grooves mimicking the changes in air pressure. 


Digital Recording 

  • Digital recording is based on sampling discrete moments in time by means of an analog to digital (ADC) converter. = take snapshots of sound over time.
  • Film, while not digital, works in a similar way.  
  • The problem is in representing an analog signal which contains an infinite amount of conceivable points into a series of discrete numeric representations.  
  • About 44,000 times per second samples are needed for digital audio. 
  • In order to reconstruct a signal, the sampling frequency must be at least twice the frequency of the signal being sampled. (Nyquist Theorem)

  • Bit depth, much like it’s counterpart in image digitization, is the amount of slots available at the sampling points to store a value. Low resolution (low bit) systems will require more rounding of the stored numbers (quantization).

  • Generally speaking:
    Voice quality 8bit
    CD quality 16 bit

  • Sample Rate and the bit depth are the two important points to consider when recording music. 
  • Floppy Discs are useless for digital audio. File size / storage is an important factor to consider.

Digital Audio :

Audio Formats -
-AIFF - Audio Interchange file format (Apple format)
-WAV - Windows audio format (Waveform)
-MP3(M4a, etc.) - Codecs
-MIDI


How do you define composition?  

Making sound into cohesive units / organizing sound. 


Muisique Concrete - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ea0sBrw6M

Dictionary definition:
“Music constructed by mixing recorded sounds, first developed by experimental composers in the 1940s.”

 

Reflection - 

 
In-class Audacity learning - 

Audacity is a free music editing and multi-track recording program. My husband works as an audio and video engineer for churches as part time job. Whenever I see him working on the sound tracks and how he manipulate those sound, I feel overwhelmed. Today's class give me a glance into his world a little and give me a little basic idea of what editing sound tracks feels like. It certainly is a whole new world to me to see the sound wave and how it could be manipulated. I think it will be fun to get to explore more about it throughout the week.


Audacity -
Audacity is a free on-line music maker that is easy-to-use with multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. It's developed by a group of volunteers as open source. It's a wave editor that's built to edit audio. Basically, it's like a recording device with editing abilities. Audacity will be a fun tool for middle school to high school age students to use to motivate them in music learning and application. Students can use it for making a sound project, record for a performance, or editing music for events or talent show... etc. Middle school students are at a stage where they need some independence and control in life. To be able to be in charge and manipulate sound is a great concept for them to learn and be motivated in discovering more about music. 

 

It's also great for music teachers to familiarize themselves with the app. The ability to edit music for varies music or performance need is great skill to have for enhancing the music classroom. The education application is not limit in the music room. The science teacher can use this to teach about sound waves. Language art teachers can use this to help students learn languages - pronunciation, and students can record and edit a speech or story read aloud. There are just some ideas I come up with. An app that could record and edit the recordings that is easy-to-use is very applicable for both students and teachers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 5

  Class started off sharing Rapper’s Delight project. Class Note -  Asynchronous music lesson example, Lean On Me-  Screencastify Ultimate Guitar  Multiple screens display Garageband onscreen keyboard 4th Grade Rhythm class - Latency - unclear voice capturing - could clear (the chair) out the space - Closure was too abrupt Ultimate Guitar -  https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ Guitar chord chart Piano keyboard diagram Transport keys Online Keyboard Options -  Soundtrap Musicca.com  - different instruments - different languages - Metronome  Musictheory.net Latency Fix - Play the audio into a external speaker behind the teacher (instead of playing the music on the computer.) Fix in post production Sound capture fix -  Speak slowly use external mic than the computer one lavalier mic (small mic clip) Screencastify - Screen recording Multiple tabs screen recording Premiere Pro -  20th Century Composers editing : Edit video clips length Collapse ...
Read more

Canon in D Soundtrap Project

Canon in D To me, this project was fun, yet intimidating at the same time. It's fun to learn to make sound tracks with different apps other than Garageband. I can see how this will give middle school students more choices to make music without having to play physical instruments and ample choices for sound, tracks and loops. I am not a tech savvy person, so this was intimidating to play with. On the flip side, even though I am not quick in learning tech, I was relieved to put together this project without much difficulty.
Read more

Week 1

Class Note: Sound - produced when something vibrates or oscillates.  There must be a vibrating source of energy, or oscillator, to create sound.  Sound waves - Sound pressure over time Sound can be divided into four components in two aspects: Acoustical properties of sound - Frequency Amplitude Envelope Harmonic Spectrum Perceptual properties of sound -  Pitch Loudness Articulation Timbre Frequency: A measure of the rate of an oscillation: how many cycles occur in a certain frame of time.  Could be indicated as cps - cycles per second  Hz = Hertz, unit of measurement for sound. The international standard unit for cycle per second Amplitude: A measure of the magnitude of the oscillation. How great an increase and decrease in air pressure is produced by a vibration. decades over time. bows and air are used to sustain the sound of strings instruments and wind instruments - keep the amplitude going.  Most commonly measured by a relative scale of decibels or d...
Read more