Keyes- tech

tech glossary	what's that cable called?	trouble-shooting	sound reinforcement	understanding mixers	multi-channel audio
Overview Many people HATE music technology, and I don't blame them. t can be confusing, and for every concert it helps, it seems to ruin three or four. Although there are absolutely sublime works that could not be accomplished with it, more often than not it simply a poor excuse for a good musician, and tends makes the mundane unavoidable. Despite all our advances, there are still many things that machines do very poorly, and many tasks we are far better off doing without technology. That's not to say it's all bad though. Many things are greatly aided by technology and some impossible without. So on these pages I'll try to point out productive an counterproductive approaches to using music technology, so that we are using machines for what they do well and NOT for what they do miserably. I'll also try to put up some helpful pages to make it less confusing.

Music and Audio Technology can:

Expand the range of sounds we can experience
Enhance performances
Reach audiences on a massive scale
Widen our range of creativity
Enhance our ability to teach effectively
Increase our musical productivity

Music and Audio Technology can also:

Narrow and cheapen the range of sounds we hear
Ruin performances
Turn off audiences on a massive scale
Severely narrow our range of creativity
Diminish our ability to teach effectively
Decrease our musical productivity

The key is recognizing what music technology does well, and what it does poorly.

Notation programs, for instance, do not handle proportion notation or sketches very gracefully - pencil & paper is much more flexible to begin a piece with. After you already know what you want to notate, or the materials you want to compose with and where they will go, notation programs can be more helpful.

What music technology does well:

Generate new sounds, or modify existing (sampled sounds). The are ideal for creating electro-acoustic pieces, particularly those programs that do not force one into time signatures and barlines.
Record, playback, edit, mix, manipulate sounds: or music production.
Amplify/Reinforce and spatialize sounds, though when done poorly (as is often the case) it can ruin concerts.
Act as an algorithmic compositional tool for the few who are into this aspect.
Music notation of beat/bar based music, such as the music industry.
Combine music and audio with video, allowing a whole generation to explore avenues of expression impossible (or prohibitively expensive) a generation ago.
Disseminate works.

What music technology does poorly:

Imitate acoustic instruments: imagine sitting in a hall hearing a violinist playing a Bach solo violin partita, then a recording of the same, then a synthesized or sampled performance via MIDI. No one would have any difficulty telling which was which.
Capture the more subtle aspects of performance: continuous changes of timbre, dynamics, note-to-note transitions etc. that we are accustom to with acoustic instruments, as above.
Music notation of time-based music, in proportional or other non-traditional notations: Pendercki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima would be very clumsy to notate and would not play back correctly.
Aid in many creative aspects of composition: one can not improvise at a computer the way one can at an instrument.
Immediately capture a particular mood: show a pianist a painting and they can likely, and immediately, improvise something that captures that mood. Have them sit down at a computer and the same thing may take hours, or days.

Some of the above is of course debatable: there are circumstances in which the ear can be fooled into thinking a synthetic sound is a real instrument, and research carries on to address a number of these shortcomings. But in my opinion, as a conservatory trained musician, the following captures the current state of things.

Financially successful companies discover what the greater majority of potential buyers want to do, and write software that allows them to do it with greatest ease. Artists are never the greater majority, and their work often distinguishes itself by doing something others, including industry programmers, haven't thought to do before. Thus the same software that may make writing a 'hit song' effortless may make doing creative work nearly impossible. Thus the following are observations I have made teaching creative composition and technology over many years.

Acoustic Compositions:
When starting a creative composition for acoustic instruments, stay away from technology. A blank piece of paper and a pencil gives infinite room for creativity, as does improvising on an instrument. A blank piece of manuscript paper less room, but still a lot. After you have sketched, scribbled, rejected, and excepted enough material to know where you are going to start and what kind of notation will best convey what you want, THEN decide if a notation program will help you or hinder you (also see 'composition pointers'). Studies have shown that students do better work and enjoy the process more working without a computer.

Electro-acoustic compositions:
Stay away from, or approach MIDI-based environments with great caution. MIDI-based sequencing environments usually lock you into a tick-based temporal structures (time signatures and bar lines) and 12-tone equal-tempered pitch structures. For commercial music this is a good thing. For creative music it imposes a set of restraints that are more trouble to get around than they are worth. Synthesized sounds from MIDI environments seldom if ever have the rich time-varying spectra of acoustic sounds (we have still yet to synthesize a realistic human voice after roughly 60 years of attempts). Starting with sampled sounds usually starts you off with a rich color pallet to work from (although there are some really cool synthesized sounds that can add to that pallet). Audacity is a well known (and well loved) free audio editor (currently) without MIDI capabilities that makes a great starting place.

Especially if your work will not involve performers on stage, think about using images. Imagery can add so much richness to the experience of a composition (Mussorgsky has certainly done well by it) and it's something that computers can do very easily. A simple PowerPoint, KeyNote, or other 'slide-show' presentation of images can work just fine. This can be greatly augmented by learning Flash, which isn't too difficult.

If you are going to work with MIDI, use software that allows you to be creative with it. Cycling74's Max and Miller Pucket's Pure Data are both famous for allowing one to take raw MIDI data and add to it, subtract from it, subject it to some algorithm one read in a magazine, or whatever. They take advantage of what computers do best - things that are impossible with an acoustic instrument, and avoid what computers do worst, try to imitate acoustic instruments.

Creative MIDI with Max

Easy editing with Audacity

Easy signal processing with Live

With electro-acoustic compositions and (real) instruments, start with at least 30 seconds of your computer-generated/processed sounds. Why? Because once you've established the mood of your piece with those sounds, you can then easily write an acoustic part that matches that mood. Starting with a 5 minute instrumental part and matching those moods on the computer is possible, but far more difficult. Of course basing the electro-acoustic portion on samples from the instrument you will be writing for almost guarantees a good match. Don't expect your computer part to be as expressive or to interact with performers as easily as another performer; if it can be done with a live performer it will probably come off better that way. Use the computer for what it does well, generating new sounds and manipulating existing sounds, and not for what it does poorly; imitating the expressive sound of an instrumentalist. That's what instrumentalists do better.

Don't shy away from real-time digital signal processing. With a program such as Ableton's Live, DSP pieces can be put together quite easily and it offers a rich source of very creative signal processing. You can also find free DSP software, including some of my own (poorly documented) software.

Sound reinforcement:

Recognize that sound reinforcement ruins more concerts than it helps (see the sound reinforcement for some pointers). Acoustical instruments and voices have incredibly complex time varying timbres and radiation patterns that no combination of microphones and loudspeaker can render perfectly, and their subtleties, which is what we listen for, can very be squashed by poor attention to detail and technique. For details, see my sound reinforcement page.