August 8th: Multiple MIDI Controllers in Reason

We were assigned a whole new project to work on this past weekend. Jordan and I, the computer science people, worked on wiring multiple MIDI controllers in Reason most of the time today.

Step 1: Connect the controllers, keyboards in our case, to the computer.

Step 2: Edit -> References -> Keyboards and Control Surfaces -> Add: Select the Manufacturer and Model, then name individual devices. (Here is one problem: Reason can't tell 2 controllers of the same model apart.)

Step 3: Edit -> References -> Advanced Control: Distribute each device to the Bus we want.

Step 4: Go to the top of the rack and click on ADV. MIDI DEVICE: assign the specific MIDI device to the Bus and Channel we need.

We can play each device on a different keyboard now! ~^_________^~

(I'm the lord of keyboards~~~)

So I tried this morning to work more on my Wake Forest Soundmap, and made a discovery that makes the process harder. I think the fact that sending samplers from Reason id so clunky could be a real hindrance to the speed of the course. When I send the sampler files to another computer, Reason can't seem to find them. Anqi explained this to me, but fixing it is a pain. What I think I will do is work on the original computer until my piece is finished, but this is an issue that needs to be figured out if the project is going to be portable.

We got a good drum roll! That means that our Wake Forest soundmap is essentially finished. This week we'll be analyzing classical pieces and creating virtual instrument versions. This could prove to be kind of a big project, and will keep us from coming up with a live performance version of our Wake Forest piece. That said, working on well known classical pieces could prove to be really exciting! We'll be splitting up partners, but I imagine the whole group will be working more or less together- the small size of the group allows for a lot more fluid workspace in terms of who is working with whom.

Drum Roll in Reason?

Right now, Beth and I are working on finding out how to make an authentic-sounding drum roll in Reason. This has proven to be more difficult than we thought... This might be a good thing to examine with Jason next week, since this is a crucial part of the WFU fight song.

August 5th

The instrumental tracks for "Unfaithful" are finally finished! YAY!!

Now Anqi and I just need to record the vocals, experiment more with the cello virtual instrument, mix everything together, and we'll have a completed project! Our goal is to have everything completed on Monday and then complete another piece featuring our second virtual instrument (vocal) by the end of the week. We're going to try and finish as many projects as possible before our research ends on Friday something that's definitely difficult for me- but possible with a lot of self-discipline from Anqi :)

August 3

We are solidly into our project of developing a piece of music that outlines a typical Friday at Wake Forest. I spent the day fiddling with speakers, trying desperately to get the sound to work... somewhere... anywhere... arrrghh.

This afternoon I worked on putting in the sounds we had recorded into the piece. I think the grooves are really cool, and I'm excited to get all the pieces put together. I'm interested to see what ideas we come up with to perform this piece live... there are a lot of options, and I want to talk to the group tomorrow to see what they think about some aspects of the performance.

August 2nd: Programming Cello Sampler - Anqi

First thanks Jason for making the video tutorials demonstrating how to program sampler instruments. They are definitely the guideline that walks me through the whole process.

- Watching Video Tutorials

The first step, obviously, was watching both of the videos so that I could have some sense about what we’d be doing later. We did not have Sound Forge at that time, so everything was on Audition. I just skimmed through the Sound Forge part and focused on the Audition part. I always feel Audition is the most user friendly software product we have been trying out, so I had watched a bunch of Audition video tutorials beforehand, including some on noise capture and reduction, which I applied later with sample editing since we never had an environment that was quiet enough for recording.

- Recording Samples: First Try

Since Erica plays cello, we automatically chose cello as our sampler. She brought her cello in one afternoon and we recorded some long notes at the end of the day, mostly 3 notes each octave. We tried a couple of times to get the best result. We thought they would be fine to make samples and called it a day.

- Selecting Loop Points: First Try

There remained the problem of making loop points. The next day we realized that the waveform of cello was so uneven that it was really hard to find proper loop points in long notes, especially when we compared it with that of the saxophone that the other group was editing.

Jason came in on that Friday and explained how to make perfect loops by splitting the sample into two parts, switching their positions and mixing down them. I practiced on that on the coming Monday but didn’t get satisfactory result since Audition automatically adjusts the splitting points and thus the loop is never perfect =( So I pretty much gave up on it after a couple days of trying.

- Loading Samples into Reason

Our loops weren’t very good, but still workable. I just went ahead loading the samples in Reason. Here came the problems with bit-depth and sample size. Jordan helped me out on that part. The converting of bit-depth should absolutely be included in the video tutorial since EVERYONE, no exaggeration, has encountered that problem. Even later when we rerecord the notes in 16-bit, we still need to go through the converting after editing the loop points for some reason. Also, some files are too big to load in Reason. So we decided to START OVER!

- Recording Samples: Second Try

To have a better idea on which notes to pick and what the original samples sound like, I opened up Reason and loaded one cello sampler in NN-XT. I went through each of the notes and got to know where the loop points usually are picked. The notes actually are shorter than I thought. I used the cello sampler as a template and planned to take the notes used in it. I realize the notes are actually not evenly taken: fewer samples are taken in higher octaves as those notes are less used in cello performance. Then Erica brought her cello in again on Monday and we recorded some short notes.

- Selecting Loop Points: Second Try

Then on that Tuesday, we finally got Sound Forge in the lab. Jordan was editing their saxophone samples on that computer for the first two days and told me about some problems he encountered. Then on Wednesday Erica and I stayed after work and I started trying out Sound Forge. It is definitely much easier to identify appropriate loop points on Sound Forge than Audition, since you can have a view of both ends of the loop at the same time (=

- Loading Samples into Reason and Playing for the First Time

After edited all the samples with Sound Forge, I loaded them into Reason and had our own first sampler.

I looked up the sheet music of Unfaithful by Rihanna and typed in all (almost) the notes into reason, and played it. It took me a good amount of time but I enjoyed it. It’s already something that I could never do before. The piece sounded alright to me except a couple of notes were quite off tune.

- Tuning

Erica listened to it and she found the notes need to be tuned as well….no need to say.. her ears are much more sensitive than mine. We finished tuning in like 5 minutes, and she played another piece with it. I think our sampler is now finished =)

August 01

Dr. Burg mentioned that she wanted in-depth descriptions of the processes behind the various projects, so I will describe what Anqi and I have been up to for the last few days. After going to the Rihanna concert together on July 16, I can safely say that Anqi and I had both come down with a case of Rihanna fever. We decided to cover her song "Unfaithful" because:

1) it's awesome!

2) we thought it would be a good fit for the virtual cello instrument we were working on

After many failed attempts at recording my cello (a truly frustrating experience,) Anqi began working some serious magic in Adobe Audition and created some truly awesome loops (which is especially impressive, given the sound waves that she had to work with. Finding a looping point was really tough.) Then, behind the scenes, Anqi used the cello virtual instrument to record the melody as well as some arpeggiated chords. I was absolutely blown away because:

1) Anqi learned how to read music incredibly well in approximately six weeks. "Unfaithful" has three flats, making it a difficult key to read in (as well as play.)

2) She typed in everything BY HAND. Jeez.

(to be continued after lunch...)

Summarizing Week 8 - Anqi Zou

Earlier last week I re-edited all the cello samples using SoundForge and after checking with Erica, we think this is the best we can do for now without rerecording the samples again. We have one octave of Erica's vocal recorded, but after listening to Ariella's vocal, I think we need at least to rerecord since it might sound very artificial and robot-like.

I finished all the Sakai assessments except the 3 Max practical exercises in section 3 by Tuesday. Wednesday I was curious how the cello samples sound like when actually played, so I randomly picked a song and keyed in the notes into Reason using my mouse (this is really the best I can do), and played it. It does sound artificial, but not too bad. Meanwhile Beth and Jordan were sorting out the sounds we collected the week before. I am very excited to see how we can put those sounds together.

Also starting on Wednesday I started watching video tutorials for Max again. I have to say one needs really good imagination in order to master Max. However, since we have not done much Max programming in this textbook, these exercises are not easy to finish. They are not difficult in nature, but do require the readers to have a better base. I actually was wondering whether it would be necessary to do these exercises at all or maybe we can add more basic exercises in earlier chapters so the readers would have a better transition.

I did not come in on Friday because I was stuck in Greensboro on Thursday night and couldn't find a ride back until Friday afternoon, so I spent some time over the weekend working on the word document and at the same time reviewing previous chapters. I will wait until later to post them, maybe after Chapter 4 and 6 are completed. As many of us already started reading Chapter 4, I am wondering if I should skim it through as well or wait until the post-test for Chapter 7 and pre-test for Chapter 4 are posted. I really hope I could read the complete version of this textbook in the next 2 weeks to have a better view of the whole structure, even with some chapters being draft.

August 26

Today was tedious. We've had a lot to do with the samples we took last week. Jordan and I spent the whole morning editing each sample, and we'll have even more to do when we want to get them all put into reason and (with a select few) looping some. The hunt for sounds was really fun, and we ended up with a ton more samples than we thought we would. In each recording, there are clips of our voices saying things that we thought were cool or funny, so we separated those and made sound files of those as well. Our hope is to create a piece that incorporates these "instrument" patches with more traditional sounds. Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6nrJ3ByzzE

This is a really somber piece about the 9/11 attacks, but the concept, musically, is very interesting. I find these sorts of musical combinations of digital sound and traditional music very interesting, and I hope that we are able to create something similar.

Such a fun week so far!

Aside from the sampling I've also skimmed through chapter 4, since it seems to be closer to completion. I still can't get on Sakai though, so I am left with not as much to do in that area.

July 22nd

For some reason today all my vocals are clicking on different microphones, at different distances, and at different volumes. I can't wait for Eric to come in and explain what the Sonar manual couldn't.

July 19th

I talked to Jordan about different sounds that we could use for the convention in October. I brainstormed a bit on the board and we watched Just For Now by Imogen Heap for inspiration.

July 26th

Today I worked on re-editing the my samples in Audition. It seems I missed a few notes and didn't edit all the dead space. I looped the samples and tried to rid the loops of the clicking noises. I realized that the higher the note the less consistent making the looping process for voice more tedious than for piano. Another problem that Erin and I both ran into is that when we try to plug the sample into Reason the samples do not show up. Troubleshooting tomorrow.

July 21st and the last few days

So the last few days I have been working on getting good loops for the sax recordings that Elizabeth did. First, I tried it with Audition, but that went poorly. I got loops, but they sounded awful and I was really unhappy when I thought I would have to use these. Then Dr. Burg brought the macs down and we got some decent loops with the software on those machines. However, a few of the samples still had pretty noticeable clicks in the loop and I was still a little unhappy about it. Then Dr. Burg brought down SoundForge and I got working on that. I really was happy with that software. After figure out how to deal with a few problems I ran into, I got a good loop for all of the sax files. I'm pretty happy with them. There is still a little "fluttery" sound to one of the files, but I think that they are about as good as I will get with them. Elizabeth also recorded some slap-tongue samples, and we got all of that into the sampler in Reason. It is a pretty decent sound, and I'm pretty happy with it. Depending on how an actual song sounds with this sampler, we might want to add a medium length set of samples to the machine, but that probably isn't a big deal.

Yesterday, I stayed home because of some back issues, and I was hoping to get some of the sakai work I need to do done, but that didn't happen like I thought it would. I plan on getting those done with tomorrow if I can.

Also, Jason brought in his recording device today, so I think we all plan on going sound hunting in the afternoon to try and get some cool sounds to use in a sampler. Early this morning, before Jason came in, a few of us were discussing some interesting ideas we had for potential pieces we could play for the showcase. I thought that it would be really cool to record a bunch of sounds that we can make vocally, like beats and whistles and hums and anything else interesting we could think of, and form that into a song that we could play at the showcase. Elizabeth jumped onto that with her own idea of recording a bunch of sounds that we run into in our daily lives here at Wake Forest, and put all of those soudns into an interesting composition with perhaps a little bit of background music to keep it interesting. I feel that something like this would be the most interesting and unique idea that we could bring to the showcase. It would clearly display the point of the class, we could add in the cello, voice, sax, and quena recordings that we have and add them into the song, and we could end up with something that is truly interesting.

Anyways, that's what I've been up to lately!

July 21

Today Jason came in and taught us how to use the mic- exciting! Now we can go out and collect sound samples! Can't wait to see what we find.

July 20

The Research Team is falling apart today! Everyone seems to be sick here, except for me. Wishing all my colleagues a speedy recovery! :/

That being said, everything is pretty quiet here. I think we're all just working on our Word documents talking about which sections/supplements we think should be on the syllabus. Hopefully we'll be doing more hands-on work tomorrow!

July 19- the afternoon

We are all super pumped to begin working on our music for Dr. Pauca! BUT we are making sure that our contributions to the iTunes app are happening IN ADDITION to our Digital Sound and Music assignments.

With that being said, while Jordan and Anqi troubleshooted a few of the loops, Elizabeth and I went to work individually on our compositions. We began by brainstorming ideas for different kinds of music that would appeal to kids. At the moment, we've each decided to work on music for glockenspiel/ kid-friendly chromatic percussion instruments. Once we come up with songs, we will be figuring out ways to play the songs on our virtual instruments. More updates later!

July 19

Today we worked on troubleshooting our loops. We're still having trouble with the loop points for the cello. But we got sound forge today, so Jordan has been trying to get the loops to sound better using that new software. I've spent most of the day going through the chapters and deciding which sections are the most useful for students to read throughout the course. I have a word document with all the text sections listed, but I haven't finished looking at the supplemental materials.

July 19th Frustrating Cello Sampler - Anqi

I have been struggling with this cello sampler since last Friday. At first I was just having trouble picking loop points, and Jason came in last week and taught us how to split and mixdown part of the audio track to make perfect loop. Somehow when I started working on my own, it didn't turn out very well at all... I am getting a little frustrated right now since I really need to have this done by today. I might take a break and work on the Sakai assessments for 45 minutes before lunch break, and work on the virtual instruments with Erica in the afternoon.

July 18

Today we got started by meeting up with Dr. Burg and talking through our goals for the week. We have a much better idea of what we need to do. Jordan and I will tighten up our sampler of saxophone sounds, which should be pretty simple. Then, the team and I are planning on working through the chapters again to provide a list of sections that students will need to read to get the most out of the course.

We've also decided that we want to write an original ballad to use our virtual instruments. I got started on the lyrics for that today, and then I'll get to work on a melody/chord progression.

I think we're all really excited for Jason to come later this week and help us go searching for new sounds. We can't wait to do something more creative!

July 18

Today's Schedule:

1) We separated into our original teams to work on/finish up our virtual instruments. Elizabeth and Jordan had to troubleshoot a few weird minor 2nds that were showing up in their samples, and Anqi is watching some video tutorials to learn more about using audition. We also discussed what type of original song we could create to use virtual instruments based on saxophone and cello and decided to write some type of ballad. Since the Harry Potter movie series has officially come to an end, many members of our generation are feeling out of place/depressed. We think that our ballad will focus on themes surrounding moving on, transitioning, the end of the magic, etc. Perhaps the song could even apply to the end of a relationship? Hopefully we'll have multiple layers going on.

2) When we get tired of the hands on work- or each other haha! - we will be working on Word documents, discussing which chapters students should read/which supplements students should have to complete.

More updates later!

Typo

Page 5 Chapter 7 Subtractive Synthesis

We don't really want a fade in on this instrument sound so we will leave the attacker slider at zero.

July 14th

I am slowly re-reading and taking notes on chapter 7. Erin and I worked on our final project once again in Audition. I sang eight notes into Audition and we are slowly finding 0 points creating loops and loading the samples into Reason. This is a tedious process but we are getting through it. We have yet to start the synthesizer, but that shouldn't take as long.

Sampler Recorder

1) I really liked the emphasis that was placed on making a copy of your sample in case something happens and you need to go back to the beginning. I feel like this is a crucial step that many digital sound and music novices can and will miss, so the tutorial does a great job in highlighting its importance!

2) Not to be rude- because I think this is a great tutorial- but Jason does say "uh" and "um" throughout the video. This can make some parts seem unprofessional.

3) Even though Elizabeth said that the recorder tuning sounded like "boiling parakeets," I enjoyed watching Jason troubleshoot. All of the student researchers have felt the pains and frustrations of needing to reboot, restart, or try another method. This section of the video proves that even professionals sometimes have to resort to plan b. It also shows just how important it is to NOT get sucked into just one way of solving a problem. Given the nature of the software, it is crucial to explore your options to create your desired result.

July 14

Yesterday we spent a lot of time working on making our virtual instruments. Jordan and I made a bunch of progress with looping the saxophone samples we made, but had a ton of trouble getting the files to open in reason. The file types are a real pain coming from Audition, and it looks like soundforge would be a better program to use. We also had trouble getting our octaves to work right, and eventually just got stuck and had to go back to watching tutorials.

THIS AFTERNOON WAS LIKE CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dr. Burg hooked us up with two macbook pros, so we were able to use loop editor and make loops SO much easier than we could in audition. We're still having trouble getting those files to loop consistently when we bring them into reason. What. A. Pain.

In other news, Jordan and I have made significant progress on both our sampler patch and our synthesized instrument. The hope is that the two will sound similar (we figured having a goal set for our synthesized sound would be helpful). It shouldn't be hard to tweak our synthesized instrument and have it ready by tomorrow afternoon to present.

It amazes me how much progress we were able to make despite serious frustrations.

July 11th

Everyone seems to be missing this morning. I worked on the sampler programming exercises making loops etc... We worked on preparing Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory for when the group is all together. On Thursday I will take notes on Chapter 7 which I find to be a very functional chapter.

July 13th Max Expired =(

Yesterday, I went through some of the Max Demos from previous chapters and I can definitely understand what they are doing much better now. The Max on my computer expired over this past weekend and the one on my laptop just expired today =( . Apparently Cycling74 wouldn't let me re-install the trial. I am hoping that I will have it installed on my computer asap. So I am kind of taking a break from Max right now. Then at the end of yesterday I started reading the third section of Chapter 7. Today my plan is to keep reading 7.3, and hopefully in the afternoon, we can start working as a group, maybe the Edge of Glory? Looking forward!

Guitar String Tutorial

Once again, I find myself without SoundForge, which really seems to be the best tool for using the information in this tutorial.
I felt like this tutorial talks a lot more than necessary about how hard to pluck the string- it's a pretty easy concept. I thought the normalization could have been better explained.
E6 thing- which octave E it is, was really unclear
Finding the zero crosspoints here was hard- this might not have been the best example.
In audition, it is hard to tell what he is doing to zoom in and out.
Reason:
Finding the files for the samples is done REALLY quickly. It would be better to get rid of the fiddling around with processes that are the same over and over and show where to find your samples. Why is high velocity the harder plucked string? I don't understand the velocity #s.
This tutorial was a lot more helpful than the recorder tutorial, but not much more engaging.

Recorder Tutorial

This morning I watched the Recorder Flash Tutorial. I found it a little frustrating to have the whole demo on a mac interface, because everything we use in lab is on PC. I also found the tutorial to be very clearly outlined- on a program my computer doesn't have. I only have Audition, and it sounds like what I need is SoundForge. I thought the practicality of this tutorial given the final project was pretty great- it told me exactly what to do and what problems I might run into. It was also very clear how to find the zero crosspoints to create a continuous wave. This would have benefited from having a readme section with a step-by-step list as well that students could print out.
The tuning section was a serious bust though. Listening to someone tune a recorder is essentially listening to the process of boiling live parakeets. I don't know that students will learn to tune from the chapters they've read, and if there are music students in the classroom, they will be able to help with the tuning. Do not make us sit through a tutorial tuning up the pitches- fast forward through that.
I thought the recorder tutorial was a little dull- I found myself drifting in terms of attention, and I think the tutorial could benefit from some shortening.

July 11

Today I was out sick for much of the day, but I came in the evening to see what I could get done. I managed to get my lady gaga edge of glory saxophone solo recorded in at least the original key. I also sent myself my finale file via email so that it doesn't get erased again (I had to redo the transcription). Hopefully tomorrow we can work on the drum track and get some of the vocals under control.

July 11

Today I realized just how behind I am on the Sakai surveys... REALLY BEHIND! I panicked a little this morning when I saw just how many I have yet to complete. My objective for today will be to finish all of the supplement reviews.

July 8

"It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday..." sdgklhsdgakls. That song has been stuck in my head since Jordan and Beth started working on it!

Today I went off to the library in order to thoroughly complete Chapter 7. Since we've been busy with so many projects, I found myself reading a lot one day and then not coming back to the material for several days. This was not very conducive to the learning process and really slowed me down. However, now I've finished with Chapter 7. I also carefully combed for typos, but didn't find any (other than the one I previously noted from pg. 26.)

Now, I just have to finish the Sakai reviews.... I've gotten very behind on those. I actually preferred the days when we would just write about the learning supplements on this blog. I feel like the Sakai surveys make it very difficult to give quality feedback as many of the questions seem to be asking the same thing. I might start over and review each learning supplement on here in addition to the Sakai surveys. Maybe Anqi, Beth, and Jordan will be able to comment on my reviews and share their feedback as well?

This afternoon, we have two new video tutorials to work on and review. Also, Jason is coming in! I'm very excited to show him all of our new projects (and I also need some help! I was unable to properly set up the AKG mike and I can't seem to record the vocals for "All the Right Moves" without clipping.)

Starting Week 6 - Anqi Zou

We are halfway through this project so far, and we are almost done with reading the textbook. Most of us start playing with the software products extensively.

Coming in this morning, we were about to start working on the Edge of Glory by Lady Gaga, but as a couple of us weren't able to be here this morning, and we really need to work as a whole team, we didn't actually going into it. Ariella led me and Percy practicing on the vocal part (it is quite embarrassing to sing in the basement of Manchester...while I'm pretty much not on the beat most of the time...).

The two videos newly uploaded tutorials are definitely very helpful. Hopefully tomorrow when everyone is here we can choose the specific virtual instruments we will be working on, and this week is meant to be productive!

July 8

Goooooooood morning!
I'm so excited to show off all the things we've learned this week. Jason is coming in this afternoon and we have TONS to show him. We have our covers of Friday and All the Right Moves, and we also have two sample packs (one of saxophone, one of percussion sounds on cello) to show him. What we want to ask him are how to get good loops of those set up, and also how to set up a drum kit using the cello sounds we made.
When I came in this morning I started working on the saxophone solo for Edge of Glory. Since we'd like to do a cover of that song (we have the vocals worked out nicely), I want to be able to do a recording of that today or Monday. I managed to find a decent sheet music copy of the solo for alto saxophone, so I just need to transpose it down a major third (since we're taking the whole piece down for ease of vocal range). Once I get the sheet music printed, I should be able to work on the solo and get it recorded using the akg mic. We're hoping to use the drum kit we create with Erica's cello sounds to create the drum beat for this cover.

Chapter 7 MIDI and Sound Synthesis: 7.2

7.2 Application

7.2.1 DNE. B

7.2.2, Linking Controllers, Sequencers, and Synthesizers, reflects material covered earlier and talks about the advantages of using MIDI to capture a performance. Firstly there’s a typo in the 2^nd paragraph, “now suppose you want also want to…”. Then it introduces 4 different methods to link controller, sequencers, and synthesizers. In Figure 7.28, these 4 options are demonstrated. However, as when we were talking about the scenario of capturing live performance, we used the word OPTION, and it might be confusing to use OPTION again in the figure right below it, as some readers might not read very carefully. Since we were using the word CONFIGURATIONS in the content, why don’t we keep using it in the figure to keep it consistent? After that, this section gives examples of a bunch of MIDI interfaces, which I found somewhat distracting. I think ONE figure with all the examples in will be clear enough to show the whole picture.

7.2.3, Making and Loading Your Own Samples states how to make one’s own samples and the issues might occur. The last sentence of first paragraph is missing a period. First sentence on page 34 “…to do is go find…” Shouldn’t it be “..is to find..”? I don’t have much to comment about the material. Overall very practical, but it might be good to have some learning supplement to go along with this section.

7.2.4, Data Flow and Performance Issues in Audio/MIDI Recording, is very well written. It reveals the potential problems might occur in audio and MIDI recording, such as our old enemy, latency, and other memory issues. This section is shorter than any other section in 7.2. I am wondering if we need to briefly talk about some cures to these problems to balance up.

7.2.5, Non-Musical Applications for MIDI, is okay. 7.2.5.1 introduces the readers MSC, which is a very important application of MIDI, while 7.2.5.2 is fairly weak in content. On page 41, the words are bold. I am wondering if it’s a typo or whatever.

July 7th

Today I started working on a drum loop. The Research Team divided the parts of Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory and we are scheduled to sing the song on Monday. I am pretty pumped to sing When Love Takes Over by David Guetta and Kelly Rowland when everyone is gone at 4 pm!

July 7 #3!

Jordan and I busted out the saxophone this afternoon and did a recording of a series of pitches in order to cover a range of notes. We fiddled with the clips to try to make them loop without a bump, but we aren't entirely sure how to make the loops sustain cleanly. I will go back and read through the materials we have as well as asking Jason to see if we can make those work better. It would be cool if we could program the synth to play one of my recital pieces, and then compare that with the recording of my performance.

7.2

This section was quite useful, as well. From what Dr. Burg was telling us, it seems like there will be supplements for looping samples to get a good sustained sound for a MIDI sampler, and since that is one of the goals of this class this section is clearly very important. The later parts of 7.2 seemed a bit more tedious but understanding the content helps understand how MIDI works so I have no problems with those parts. Everything in chapter 7 was put together quite nicely, with the exception of a few typos and such. I think this was the most important chapter that we have gone over so far, so I think that a lot of time should be put into it during the lecture. However, it is possible that the students will be fairly confident with how MIDI works by that point (I'm not sure when in the course Dr. Burg plans to start having the students working with the machines), so maybe there won't be a need to focus as much on this chapter.

At the top of page 41, there is an error. In the sentence that talks about the possible error, an "s" is missing in what should be "source."

First part of the week

So I worked on "Friday" for the first two days of the week with Elizabeth. It took a bit of work, but we came up with a decent track that we were happy with. There are still a few clipping issues with some of the vocals, but I don't think they are bad enough to worry about and we decided to let them go. I came in early on Wednesday and recorded the rap for the song. That was fun.

After all of that was done, I Started on Chapter 7. Since we worked so much on the song, I wasn't able to finish the reading. I'm working on it and should have it done by the lunch tomorrow.

Typo

Chapter 7, pg. 26 reads "Now suppose you want also want to capture the musician’s performance." I think you meant to get rid of the first want?

July 7 Continued

Oh also... Computer issues. I don't have Audition or MATLAB on my computer, nor do I seem to have Reason without its disk (and I'm not sure where the disk is). Also Sonar dislikes both my microphone and midi keyboard. It's kind of hard, with basically no software, to work on anything on my own. I think that's why there has been so much waiting on everyone else... because I can't do much without them. At least Finale works.... but we're using that less and less often.

July 7

Still sort of waiting on people to get to the same place. Everyone is finishing their reading and whatnot this morning, and I can't really start doing a lot of recording without some collaborative help. Today Erin and I started working on Lady Gaga's The Edgy of Glory, because we want to work more with recording audio, and it would provide an opportunity to record multiple layers of harmony. The musicians and I really want to do an acoustic arrangement, which would be fun for us, but we want to be sure not to leave out the comp sci majors. What I assume is that we'll work on the musicy stuff, and then have them help us get it all recorded and mixed down. That's how Jordan and I worked for Friday, and I think it went fairly well.
This afternoon I will track down Jordan and make him take a break to help me get my saxophone samples finished. I would like to experiment with the options on how to manipulate that sound, and what my options are.
When it comes to making synthesized instruments I am a little unsure how to decide which instruments we want. It's much easier to manipulate a sound to replicate something than it is to make decisions without any inspiration. When we're talking about virtual instruments that don't necessarily exist already, there is a pretty wide gray area. I think for non musicians this is somewhat daunting, but maybe even more so for musicians because we are so accustomed to pre-existing instrumentation. Hopefully when I start recording my saxophone samples I will have a clearer picture of what I will want.
It is also sort of tough to decide on instrumentation for a piece that doesn't exist. As we're all going to be creating different instruments, it's hard to tell at this point what sort of piece we will be creating. Will we have any melodic instruments? Will we have any percussive instruments? Will they all be string-like sounds? Will any of them be decidedly synth sounds? Without knowing this, composition is tough. Hopefully when we brainstorm on these questions we will be able to come up with a few instrument sounds that would go well together, and each group can work on one or two of these instruments.
I'm also waiting on more text to read. I tend to work exclusively on the chapter material when I get it, because it's not as fun as playing with the software so I like to get through it as quickly as possible. The problem with that though, is that I finish before the rest of the team and then am without any collaborators to work on any of our projects. This is probably not an issue in a classroom setting, but is a little tricky when we are relying on having other people around to help us get moving on various projects.
All in all, things are rolling along. I'm learning a TON about the software from all the reading and especially the covers we've done, so I'm excited to see what we create next.

July 6 Continued

Today EVERYONE LEFT ME!!!!
Jordan wasn't feeling well, Erica was sick, Erin had to leave slightly early, and Anqi was out. So I was left the last hour with not a whole heck of a lot to do. I finished getting my mp3 file sent to myself so it will be added to my itunes at home. I also listened to Edge of Glory a few times in order to learn the saxophone part and vocals, because Erin and I would like to cover that song next. I have my saxophone today, but without my partner it's really hard to do sample recordings, so we'll have to do that tomorrow. Hopefully we'll be able to get a good idea of what we want to do with our instruments... but we need everyone to do that. In any case, I'll be working on some of my musical endeavors and fixing the fade out I messed up in All the Right Moves for the rest of the afternoon.

July 6

This morning Jordan and I completed a cover of "Friday". There's more we could add in terms of harmonies, etc., but we think for now this is a pretty solid track. We're working on trying to get it converted to an mp3, because I think having my own cover of something on my ipod would be awesome. This is kind of a tricky process, because we have a whole bunch of tracks in both sonar AND reason, so getting them to save together is a challenge.
I do think that this is an important thing to teach students. It is really fun to create something and be able to take it home and listen to it, so being able to burn discs or create sendable files is really important.
Once Jordan and I finished that, Erin and I worked on harmonies for "All the Right Moves". Erica had already recorded a vocal track (which she may want to edit later on, there's a little bit of clipping toward the end), but we added a few extra parts and also a piano ostinato that makes the orchestration sound more complete. This track is getting pretty close to being completed as well.
I learned how to do a fade-out in Reason today, with help from Jordan, so now if we have a rewire in Sonar we can do a fade of the entire song. That is a really practical skill, and I'm glad I know how to do it now.
Other than those projects, there's not much reading to be done, so I suppose I'll just find another song to work through, as this seems to be the best way to get myself familiar with the software. After lunch I might bring in my saxophone to see what we can do with those sounds, moving in the direction of a new synthesized instrument.
More updates to come later in the day!
Beth

July 5th

The first thing I did when I came in today was to finish the supplemental activity and finish the sakai evaluation. That was a pretty helpful tool, so I was pleased to have had the experience and will use the supplement as a resource later in the course. The rest of the day was spent working on finishing "Friday". For the moment I'm waiting on Jordan to learn the section that needs a male vocalist, and then we will try to hear, learn, and record the backup vocals. We should have a complete cover soon. While we're finishing that, Erica is learning the cello part to "All the Right Moves" by One Republic. Once she does that, we'll work with the Drum part Erin has put together, and I'll learn the vocals. Hopefully we'll do an entire cover of that song as well.
I really think that this part of the course is pivotal. Working on songs that we like, know, and enjoy creating is a really great way for us to get comfortable with the software. We've already essentially created our own virtual instruments, because we've had to work with the patches we have and alter them to sound more like the instrumentals we want. It's also much less intimidating than the idea of composing an original piece.

July 5th

Today Erin, Percy and I were supposed to work on When Love Takes Over but Erin's computer didn't cooperate. Erin and I recorded my voice on about 2 octaves. I did the sampling exercise and the assesment and found it to be helpful for our final project. That is it for now!

July 4th

Today was a little strange, because Erica and I were the only ones in the lab for most of the day. Before lunch, I worked on recording vocals for "Friday", but the next section of the piece requires a little more work, and I could use Jordan's help getting the instrument sounds right. I have an idea of what needs to come next, and we will probably be able to do a full cover of the song. Tomorrow I will have Jordan help me continue to work on this song, and Erica will start our next recording.

Good 4th of July!

Beth

Chapter 7 MIDI and Sound Synthesis: 7.1

Overall this chapter is by far the most practical and most successfully written one. It gives very detailed information covering the physical structure of MIDI, how it works on a high level of abstraction, how to create our own synthesizer sounds etc. Along with the learning supplements, this chapter definitely stands out from others. I feel I’m biting the real meat of this text.

7.1 Concept

7.1.1, The Beginning of Sound Synthesis, is two and a half pages long, and since it is not THAT closely related to the actually work, it is very easy to get dry and be skipped. But we’ve already put so many words in it, why don’t we use more pictures of the electrical instruments mentioned to walk the readers through the history of sound synthesis? (say, we mentioned MIDI controller, but some readers might not know what a controller is until 7.1.2.)

7.1.2, MIDI Components, talks about various meanings of MIDI and gives an example of a setup for recording and editing MIDI on a computer. However, if we could move Figure 7.5 to the front of the bullets, or insert another figure showing the entire structure, the readers would have a concept of the whole picture before they start going into the details and getting lost somewhere 2 pages later. And we really need to move Figure 7.6, the 5-pin DIN connection for MIDI, away from the end of this section since it is an example of earlier material, but we already summarized the section in the paragraph above it.

7.1.3, MIDI Compared to Digital Audio, is pretty well written. I don’t have much to say. Maybe mention that we will discuss Note On message later in 7.1.5.2? Actually we might not even need to mention the data bytes until later.

7.1.4, Channels, Tracks, and Patches in MIDI Sequencer, is very straight forward. I have nothing much to say about this section except it has a typo in the first sentence before the word “track,” and some figures in this chapter are a little bit hard to read. For example, Figure 7.13, I have to zoom in A LOT to see what’s going on in the picture, and this can be easily solved by cutting off part of the right end of this picture.

7.1.5, A Closer Look at MIDI Messages, is the most mathematical and theoretical section in 7.1. First, can we possibly change the name for this section? “A Closer Look” just doesn’t sound right. In 7.1.5.1, a figure showing the conversion among binary, decimal and hexadecimal numbers is needed, or we can refer the reader to the previous section on binary.

I do not have much comment on 7.1.6, just Figuare 7.17 is a little hard to read.

7.1.8, Synthesizer Components, gives brief description of each component within the synthesizer, and the practice exercise in 7.1.9 wraps everything up. As these two sections are not finished yet, I am looking forward to reading the completed version.

"Dynamite" proved to be more difficult than we anticipated, making it kind of a horrible song to choose. Anqi and I laid down the first verse and it has so many layers! We started getting very frustrated trying to select patches and combine everything- I have a newfound appreciation for music producers! Despite our frustrations, I feel like we're really learning a lot about Reason through this practical albeit difficult exercise. I think Anqi and I are going to go back to reading and then work on "Dynamite" starting tomorrow am. Time to REBOOT!

June 30

What an awesome day.
Jordan and I spend basically the entire day working on creating a karaoke track to Rebecca Black's "Friday". We've created the basic backtrack for the intro, verses, and chorus, but have yet to install the vocal background. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u9-AdPAOy0
I also have polished off chapter 7, and am looking forward to presenting our work tomorrow. The other groups are hard at work getting their projects started. This was a really fun project to work on because it let me practice my listening skills, and Jordan was able to help me put what I heard into the software. What I found interesting was that while I was able to hear the basic chord progression and would get something "close enough", Jordan was much better able to hear the details of each and every note and whether they were correct. I don't know if that means that his listening is better than mine or if it means that I am more able to "fill in" what I need to hear based on a chord progression.
I did find sometimes that my vocabulary for music wasn't always totally appropriate for working with someone who wasn't classically trained. When I talk about hearing a "pedal tone" or start counting rhythms numerically or talking about the chord progression, I find myself needing to explain what I mean in a different way. I thought that was a good skill to learn, because it means I have to not only understand what I want to hear, but be able to express it in more than one way.

Finishing Chapter 7

I'm working through Chapter 7 right now, and I agree with Anqi- this chapter is really well-written overall. It manages to convey a lot of concepts clearly and makes great connections between the reading material and the software we're working with- very practical! I'm especially enjoying learning about samplers since we've been working with that so much in Reason.

Typo:

pg. 18- in the second paragraph, it reads "There can be than one audio sample associated with a single note." This should say "There can be MORE than one..."

After lunch, Anqi and I are going to start on our project! We we we so excited! :)

June 29th Finishing up Chapter 7 - Anqi

I finally finished up reading Chapter 7. It is definitely the most practical chapter we've read so far and overall the content is fairly well written. I am playing more with the learning supplements right now as I did not try them out thoroughly while reading. My plan is to finish the assessments for learning supplements asap, then start rereading this chapter again and write the evaluation (this is the first chapter that I had to actually take some notes to help me understand). Erica and I are definitely gonna start on the project tomorrow, even though I'm not really sure what we are supposed to do.

Have fun blogging!

June 29th

I'm working on Chapter 7. The song we picked to transcribe is When Love Takes Over and we should be done at the beginning of next week since we just started planning today. I am very excited for the final product!

7.1

7.1.1 - The Beginnings of Sound Synthesis

This was pretty interesting. There isn't much else to say. I did think it was kind of funny that yesterday I watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory that had a Theremin in it. That was helpful to visualize the instrument, since I saw it being used so recently. It was sort of fun to see how everything came together to come to the synthesized music we work with these days.

7.1.2 - Midi Components

It seems to me a little unnecessary to have the list of different meanings for MIDI at the beginning of this section and then almost repeat them soon after when giving real-life examples of the different meanings. Why not just condense this all by combining the two lists and save a little room?

Above the list of real-world examples on page 4, the Preface is mentioned when it should be chapter 1 that is mentioned. The Preface is mentioned again in the bullet point on page 4, at the top of page 5 it talks about figures from the preface. It should say figures from chapter 1. This is in the second bullet point.
Immediately below the aside on page 5, there is a typo. "If you don’t have a dedicate hardware of software..." Dedicate should be dedicated.

I feel like figure 7.3 should be placed directly below the second bullet point on page 5 instead of at the bottom of the page. It makes more sense, and wouldn't hurt anything.

In the first line on page 6, it references the Preface again, when it should reference chapter 1.

7.1.3 - 7.1.4

All of the sections so far in this chapter are pretty important to gaining a good basic understanding of MIDI and the differences between MIDI and digital audio. However, since we've been using the MIDI already, most of the information is just reinforcing knowledge we already have at this point.

7.1.5.1 - Binary, Decimal, Hex

I feel like since you spent time on binary, spending a little time, either in lecture or in the book, on hex would be a smart thing to do. It wouldn't take that much time, but if it is brought up like this I feel like it should be explained a little bit more.

7.1.5.2 - MIDI Message Types and Format

I think that it is important to know how MIDI works, and learning how the messaging behind a MIDI machine works is crucial to understanding MIDI. I think sections like this are important, but there really isn't anything that you can do with messaging. This makes it a little hard to stay focused.

7.1.6 - Synthesizers vs. Samplers

The first sentence in the second paragraph on page 18 says "There can be than one audio sample." I assume "more" should be placed after "can be."
At the bottom of the aside on page 19 the tails of the g and y are missing. This needs to be aligned better.

7.1.8 - Synthesizer Components

I thought this was a good section. The content was pretty practical to what we are doing, and along with the help that Jason gave us last Friday working with the synthesizers, I think I'm starting to understand how to manipulate them better. Some of this content was review, since we've been working with these machines for several weeks now. I was going to mention that I thought it would be good to have a supplement here, but then I saw the supplement in the next section! I was so, so, so excited.

7.1.9 - Creating your own Synthesizer sounds

The Reason supplement was great. I thought that it was the most practical supplement we've had so far and I had fun doing it. For some reason I couldn't get the sound to work with the subtractonaut supplement, so I didn't get that one finished.

Beginning of the week

So Monday I finished up the last bit of Chapter 5, finished the analysis and took the post test. After that, I started on Chapter 5 and worked my way through the first few sections. Nothing too interesting, but I heard a song on Pandora ("Like A Stone" by Audioslave) that I thought I could make with Reason and Sonar, so I started the drum beat for that at the end of the day. I got really interested in it and worked on it for most of Tuesday, and then for a little bit in the morning on Wednesday. I made it a decent way through the song and only have about a third of it left. I found it difficult to find the right chord when trying to translate guitar chords into sonar, so that took me a long time. Not having any real experience with chords made this pretty challenging for me, but with some online help I think I got all of the correct chords I needed. I'm pretty happy with what I have so far and I might come back after everyone is gone one day and lay down a vocal track for it - see if I still have any singing skills left! I've been having fun with it, but it is time to finish up Chapter 7 so I'll be waiting to finish that song until after I've finished 7.

Chapter 7

Today I continued reading Ch. 7 (which I started yesterday.) My goal is to finish the reading and evaluations today so I can begin work on duplicating one of the pop songs we've chosen. So excited for this new project!

June 28th Continued

Today I completed chapter 7, and have read through all of the supplemental activities. I have taken notes, and tomorrow morning I will come in and fill out all my evaluations. I want to be finished with the evaluations in the morning so that I can start working on a more fun project with a coworker. It's a little tricky to try to start that project, because not everyone finishes the reading at the same time. I also don't seem to have reason on my computer without the disk... and I don't know where the disk is. But tomorrow I will have audition, and I should be able to get started nomatter what my coworkers have finished.

June 28th

I read the article Computational Thinking in Music. It was really interesting to read how interconnected everything is... I am reading Chapter 7 all of the information is very practical. Tomorrow we will continue with REBOOT! and I am very excited to sing the melody.

June 28

Today I started out slow with my reading of Chapter 7. I do, however, think that this chapter is one of the most relevant to what our final project will become. Learning about exactly how to make samples and loop them is really great, because it will help us make the type of instruments we want later on. I also found the computation and composition article to be really interesting, because it deals with my favorite musical genres. Minimalism and 20th century experimentalism is one of my favorite areas of study, and many of the loops I've created imitate that style. Hopefully this afternoon I can finish reading Chapter 7 and move on to finishing the evaluations for each supplemental activity.

Today we spent the day working through chapter 7. In the morning I finished my chapter 5 assessment, took the chapter 5 postest and the chapter 7 pretest, and began reading. I'm well into chapter 7, and have pages of notes to use for my evaluations. We also made a list of three or four songs we think we could recreate. The day has been pretty quiet, as we all are trying to get through chapter 7 quickly so we can begin working on our other project.

June 27th Starting Chapter 7 - Anqi

Monday, a new cycle starts here. I finally caught up with my work on Chapter 5. As we are already split up into groups, and will be starting collaboration as soon as tomorrow, I am trying to finish chapter 7 asap. My goal today is to read as much of 7.1 as I can and I will blog tomorrow morning.

Chapter 5 Digitalization: 5.2 (To be Continued..)

5.2 Applications

5.2.1 Choosing and Appropriate Sampling Rate

5.2.1 explains why we choose sampling rates that are higher than the upper limit of human hearing, and talks about the tradeoff between sampling rates and file sizes. Overall this part is brief and informative.

Just out of curiosity, why do we pick 44100Hz as default sampling rate from the very beginning? I looked it up online later, but maybe we can briefly mention it somewhere.

5.2.2 Input Levels, Output Levels, and Dynamic Range

My first impression is that the last a couple of paragraphs are a little bit dry and hard to read.

Also, I don’t quite understand Figure 5.19. How can I tell no sample value is less than -90.3 dBFS from the picture? And in the Aside, the number 32768 might be random to most readers. It would be good to write it as 2^(16-1) since this is a 16-bit system.

5.2.3 Latency of Digital Audio Systems

With the help of Flash Tutorial: Reducing Latency, 5.2.3 does a pretty good job explaining what latency is and how to reduce it. However, without the flash tutorial, the part on buffer size is quite hard to understand, and it doesn’t explain the relationship between buffer size, sampling rate and latency well enough.

5.2.4 Word Clock

This part well explains the concept of word clock, which is pretty unfamiliar to most readers. The master vs. slave analog is very good. The Flash Tutorial: Word Clock is another success. I feel most learning supplements in this chapter are more helpful than the text itself.

Chapter 5 Digitalization: 5.3 and Review on 5.1 Part II

5.3.2 Sampling and Quantization in MATLAB

On Wednesday I reviewed 5.1.2.3 Bit Depth and Quantization Error. My day started with playing with MATLAB in hope of finishing up Experimenting with Quantization Error in MATLAB. I feel the language used in those programming exercises instructions is very different from other parts of the text. I've been having a hard time understanding what exactly the exercise is asking me to do. For example, I don't really understand what the average magnitude error is and the process of normalization. Even when I was checking the solution, I still don't quite understand what is going on. The information given in 5.3.2 is very limited for an exercise like this.

5.1.3 Digital Audio Formats and Transmission

This section is mostly informative. It does have practical purposes, but not that applicable to us at this point.

5.1.3.1 Audio Data Stream and Transmission Protocols

The beginning generally talked about the purpose of using transmission protocols, but a specific example with the devices mentioned in the previous chapters and how transmission protocols help might make this chapter not that disconnected from previous knowledge. Overall 5.1.3.1 delivers quite amount of information the readers might need. Just one point I didn’t really like: TOSLINK is for Toshiba-Link, even on its official website it reads like that. The TOShiba-LINK just makes me feel weird.

5.1.3.2 Signal Path in an Audio Recording System

My first impression was that the style of the figure in this part did not go along with any others in this text at all. But it is indeed very easy to read.

5.1.3.3 Digital Audio Types

Table 5.1, Common audio file types, is very helpful. I think to most readers, skimming though this part and referring to this table will fulfill their learning purposes.

June 24th

I was hoping to get my blog up to date today (gotta get better at that), but our little chat with Jason, Eric and Dr. Burg got me a bit distracted. I'll finish that up and submit the analysis on Sakai over the weekend.

I thought the talk at the end of Friday was good and really helped bring together some ideas. It was helpful to get more clear ideas of what we could do in Reason, Sonar and Finale. I think it set us up for a more directed path next week. I thought it was fun to work on Reboot this week, and now it seems like we have a bit more freedom and direction for where we could go with it.

The suggestion I have for the little mini side projects we discussed giving the students is to give a song a week for the first few weeks and make each one a little bit more complicated. That way people are learning the software more and more as time goes on, and by the time they are getting ready to make their own composition they will be quite comfortable with the software.

This week was definitely more social and I think we are getting more comfortable with each other, which is obviously a good thing.

5.2 sections

5.2.1 - Choosing an Appropriate Sampling Rate

This section is very practical, since having the right sample rate is crucial to recording a high quality sound. This section is well-written, and straight forward. I also thought it was interesting to read about the different reasons we would need to record above 20 kHz.

5.2.2 - Input Levels, Output Levels, and Dynamic Range

Like several of the sections in this chapter, I think that this section is quite practical. Learning about clipping and the different ways to avoid it is crucial for successful recording of audio. At the top of page 25, where it talks about the Bit Depth and Dynamic Range supplement, it mentions that the supplement is linked at the top of the section, but it is actually linked on page 25, right next to this sentence.

5.2.3.1 - Latency in a Live Performance

I feel like this section needs, a little bit more info on how to prevent this kind of latency, but there might just not be any more to say. I'm not sure, it just felt a little bit empty at the end of the section and I felt like there could have been some more detail there. Latency is a big issue, and even though live music production isn't necessarily as much of what this course is about, I feel like perhaps this could use a bit more content.

5.2.3.2 - Writing to the Hard Drive During Digital Audio Recording

This section does a really good job of explaining why it is important to use an external hard drive with firewire when working with digital sound recording. It kept it simple and I think anyone would be able to easily understand it. I think that it is possible that this section may be better placed in Chapter 1, but I can understand why it is placed here as well.

Page 28 mentions dynamic allocation of space in passing, but never mentions it again. I think there should be a little bit of an explanation of dynamic allocation of memory, if it is gonna be mentioned like this. No music major is going to understand what it is if it is just mentioned in passing like this.

5.2.3.3 - Latency, Drivers, and Buffer Size

This section is helpful and easy to understand. It covers the required content well and deals with the potential problems associated with latency as good as can be expected.

5.2.3.4 - Software Vs. Hardware Monitoring During Digital Audio Recording

All of these different sections on latency seem like a little bit of overkill, but at the same time it is clear that these different sections are different and all important in one way or another. Perhaps combining a few of them and condensing them would be better. I also feel like 5.2.3.4 should be placed right after 5.2.3.2. There's nothing wrong with this section, though.

5.2.4 - Word Clock

This is a good concept to end the section with, since it kind of brings all of the latency concepts together and deals with them all with basically one solution.


Conclusion

This chapter is very practical and important to understanding how to record or create a good audio track to/ on a computer. It got a bit dry at times, but I feel like most of the content is pretty important and worth reading if the student really wants to learn how to record and create quality audio tracks.

June 24th

I didn't want to be very behind next week so I just finished a lot more of my Sakai evaluation of Chapter 5. I can't wait to sing REBOOT I will be in the lab Tuesday and Wednesday. See you guys soon!

June 23

I've been sitting here for the past few hours, trying to figure out how to use Reason's arpeggiator and Thor, and am getting kinda frustrated. I decided to try and brainstorm some ideas for the synth lead for "Reboot" instead. Beth and I also spent some time creating different drum loops/effects for The Research Team's first hit.

I'm continuing to read Chapter 5, even though I feel like most of the material is going straight over my head (especially 5.1.3.1... I have read that part several times, and it isn't becoming any more clear.) However, the learning supplements have really been helping, and I feel like most of this information could be clearly conveyed in a lecture.

June 23

Today I finished reading the new version of 5.2, and took notes in order to better evaluate it. I will hopefully get started on the evaluation (which will take a while, since I will need to sift through my notes) today. Erica and I are planning on tweaking "Reboot" so that we can hopefully have a semi-performable version at the beginning of next week to present. There are actually a lot of projects going now, and it would be nice to present them to each other at a set time during the week.... maybe we could do that ourselves? Just a thought.

June 23rd Not off a Good Start...

My day started with playing with MATLAB in hope of finishing up Experimenting with Quantization Error in MATLAB. I feel the language used in those programming exercises instructions is very different from other parts of the text. I've been having a hard time understanding what exactly the exercise is asking me to do. For example, I don't really understand what the average magnitude error is and the process of normalization. Even when I was checking the solution, I still don't quite understand what is going on. The information given in 5.3.2 is very limited for an exercise like this.

To make sure I can finish my work at least before the end of today and leave tomorrow more flexible, I'll first read 5.3.4 the Mathematics of Dithering and Noise Shaping, and then pick up from where I stopped on Tuesday, beginning of section 2. Hopefully by the end of the day I'll finish all the assessments for Learning Supplements on Sakai.

Chapter 5 Digitalization: 5.3 and Review on 5.1 Part I

5.1.2.2 Sampling and Aliasing

Mathematically, this part is very confusing to me, but with the help of the Flash Tutorial, I can visualize the phenomenon of aliasing better, but not sampling.

On page 4, under Figure 5.3, it stated “Figure 5.3 shows eight samples being taken for each cycle of the sound wave”, and then it talks about the frequency of the sound wave and sampling rate. And the next paragraph gave an example on aliasing. But I feel the process of sampling and phenomenon of aliasing could be explained better. I’d like to emphasize on the SAMPLING. If we want 8 samples in one cycle, we chose a sampling rate that is 8 times as high as the frequency of sound wave, thus given frequency of 440Hz, we need sampling rate of 8*440Hz, which is 3520Hz. We do NOT need to mention that the samples are stored as binary numbers right now since binary numbers will not be talked about until quantization, and it might cause confusion here. The reconstruction of sound wave is a process of the DAC fitting a sine wave on the sampled points (I’m not 100% sure on this part, but it must be some kind of fitting through some numerical methods, say, starting from fitting the sine wave of 20Hz, the lowest frequency human ears can hear, and increasing the frequency until all the samples can be fitted), which means, we need at least 2 samples per cycle to reconstruct the original sound wave; that is a sampling rate of at least twice as high as the frequency of the original sound wave; this is also the core meaning of the Nyquist Theorem. THEN we can say that IF the sampling rate is not high enough, aliasing will happen, followed by an example of aliasing.

In the figures, I hope the fact that the samples are measured at “equally-spaced moments in time“ will be emphasized. Figure 5.3 is definitely not only a graph of a 440Hz sound wave, it also shows the samples measured at every 1/(440*8) seconds.

At the end of 5.1.2.2 we can say refer to 5.3.1 for the algorithms for aliasing.

5.3.1 Mathematics and Algorithms for Aliasing

I have to admit that I see the algorithms, but the examples given are just NOT helpful since they only demonstrate how WE draw the graphs, but not how the graphs are actually generated in the process of sampling. The algorithm is NOT what causes the problem. It is the omission of necessary sampled points that lead to the error.

Figure 5.28 should be called 1760Hz wave aliased to a 240Hz wave due to being sampled at 1000Hz, because obviously there are two waves in it, and the 1760Hz one is not as important as the 240Hz one, plus there is a typo that it’s Hz not kHz.

5.1.2.3 Bit Depth and Quantization Error

At the beginning it says the bit depth determines the precision of sample, but HOW? It would be nice to mention that bit depth is actually the memory it takes to store this sample. It is like image resolution; the higher the bit depth is, the less quantization error is, the more accurate the sound is after ADC, meanwhile the more memory it takes to save this sample, giving the readers a general idea of what bit depth is. Also I believe most readers need to recognize the tradeoff between quality and audio file size, but not how bit depth actually works.

The example given on quantized wave explains itself pretty well if standing on itself, away from sampling; and the figures, as well as Max Demo: Bit Depth, also go along with the example (quantization by rounding down). The Flash Tutorial: Quantization, which is made from Audition, however, gives an example of rounding to the nearest integers (for a 4-bit one, it has 15 levels, 7 positive, 0, and 7 negative). I am not sure whether we should keep it consistent through all our examples, or at least mention it somewhere that the example given in the Flash Tutorial rounds to the nearest integers.

The description for Figure 5.7 is just WRONG! I do not see why we subtract the stair-step wave form the true sine wave, since we DO NOT hear the original sound wave, and the unwanted part should be the part which the stair-step wave has but the original wave does not; instead, we need to subtract the sine wave FROM the stair-step Wave, and we will get negative amplitude, which doesn’t matter as long as it is right. OR we can just say the green wave is the difference of those two waves, making it okay to be a positive amplitude.

(Part II coming up...)

June 22- REBOOT!

Today has been awesome.
We finished up most of the Chapter 5 things we need to finish. I need to look over the newest version of section 2 in order to complete my final assessment of the chapter, but other than that I've finished all the other assessments. I have also nearly completed my choral setting of "Day", which I will hopefully complete and perform in one manner or another. The team and I decided, after joking about our skills with reason and sonar, that we would write a pop song. Our song, entitled "REBOOT", is a neo classic dance groove that deals with the ever-present love/hate conflict between man and computer. The whole team contributed to the writing of the lyrics, I came up with the melody and notated it in finale, Erica has started the initial harmony analysis, and we've started a few loops in sonar to use as accompaniment.
Fun as this is, we realized when we started the song that this could be an EXCELLENT form of the final project for this class. If students were asked to create a simple song, create an accompaniment track in sonar or reason, then required to create a music video and mix it down in audition, it would be an all-encompassing project. The hope is that the team and I can get together to make a music video and use all of our knowledge to create a fun final result.

The Research Team presents "Reboot!"

Today we began work on a group song, titled "Reboot!" We came up with the lyrics this morning, and right now I'm working on a drum loop in Reason. We plan to rewire Reason into Sonar so we can combine our Reason tracks with recorded vocals (and possibly a killer saxophone solo via Beth!) After this, we will edit our track in Audition. Updates soon!

June 22nd

Yesterday I promised more comments but didn't follow through. I started to play with vocals on Sonar X1 and I tried harmonizing with myself and came up with a ditty that I liked. Today I worked on coming up with the lyrics for Reboot by the Research team aka the Digital Sound and Music team. I feel like we have some great melody ideas that are ready to be put to the lyrics. I also finished Chapter 5 and started on the evaluations on Sakai.

Feeling Challenged...June 22nd

I came in the lab and was about to start writing about my learning experience from yesterday. Then I just felt it is quite challenging to put my words together since I am not 100% confident that I have understood the material in this chapter. I am also kind of behind on blogging. Hope I can be more productive today. My goal today is to try out the exercises in section 3 while rereading section 1, and try to visualize the process of sampling, dithering and quantization better.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 is so far the most difficult chapter for me to get through and digest. I've frequently caught myself speed-reading, glancing at the information but failing to retain it... so it's been taking me a while. I think next week will be better, though, when I'm forced to work at a faster pace (I agree with Elizabeth here!)

Also, maybe on Thursday or Friday, could we separate into our pairs, do some work in Reason/Sonar/Finale/Audition, and then present our projects to one another at the end of the day? I think that would make things a little more fun around here :)

June 21

Today we were left to our own devices again. Basically what that means is a bit more chatter, but I've made it through the first two sections of Chapter 5, and should be able to finish the evaluations by the end of this afternoon. This chapter has been challenging, because the material is a little less exciting, but I've found the supplemental materials to be helpful. The florescent lights are starting to bother me, though. I think investing in some lamplight or ensuring we take a brief walk outside every so often would be good for us physically. I'm feeling overtired and am getting persistent headaches and I think the computer screens are to blame. My suggestion for the sake of potential students in this course is that the course materials be printed so that the reading can be done outside or in different locations.

I'm feeling like we're a little beyond the pace expected here. I have read through chapter 5 and taken fairly detailed notes on what I think could be changed. I'm only three evaluations away from being finished with chapter 5. I think outside of the chapters, we really need to have a few goals to be working toward. That way we don't' end up waiting on something else to do. I think that next week when we are expected to fly through two chapters we will feel more productive because we will have more of a time crunch, which truthfully is a good thing for Wake students...

June 21st

I am currently trying to find my way through chapter 5. This chapter is pretty dense I think the tutorials will help condense the material. I am also working on a four section piece in Finale. More comments later!

Chapter 5 Digitalization: Section 5.1.1, 5.1.2 & 5.3.1

After one week of struggling with music theory, finally, here comes the material I couldn’t wait to read about! After skimming through this chapter, this chapter reminds me of a computer science class I took in high school, where I learned about memory computation and different file types, and a math contest problem, through which I got to know decibel as well as comb filtering. This chapter talks about many concepts with comparatively complicated meaning, taking me much time to understand, but compared with those music notations in Chapter 3, these make much more sense to me.

5.1.1 Analog vs. Digital describes the process of analog and digital conversion among and within devices. However, it might be easier to read if the sentences are divided more clearly, say, one sentence for each device. 5.1.2 Digitalization is fairly easy to follow in general. All the concepts are pretty straight forward except 5.1.2.4 and Noise Shaping in 5.1.2.2.5, but I guess it will become clearer after I read the algorithm in section 3. As the material is getting dry when I reached the beginning of 5.1.3 Digital Audio Formats and Transmission, where it starts talking about hardwares, I switched to 5.3, the math and science part. I want to mention that for the readers who are interested in knowing the algorithm behind and are able to read the material in section 3, reading section 2 followed by the corresponding algorithm in section 3 is a very good way to get to know how things actually work.

After reading 5.1.2.3 and 5.1.2.4, I am still very confused by how the sample points are chosen and how the sound waves are quantized. It still makes a lot of sense, but takes effort to think it through. I hope a complete example or demonstration that combines the quantization level and selection of sample points would be given. From my understanding, one sample is chosen after a fixed time slice, and the value is rounded to the lower quantization level. The higher bit depth is, the more quantization levels will be, and thus the closer the shape of the sample points make up is to that of the original sound wave, and the smaller the error wave is… Also I don’t quite understand the concept of SQNR. Does it just mean the bigger n we choose, the bigger SQNR will be, thus the noise will be really quiet comparing with the sound?

Flash Tutorial: Dynamic Range

Clearly states 2 meanings of dynamic range.

I really like the example that compares between Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Deva Premal’s Sammasati. It clearly shows the difference between 2 audio pieces with different dynamic range. On the pages where quantization process is shown (rounding down), it would be nice to show the original position of the sample points, or vertical lines showing where the samples are chosen. I should have written this earlier in the assessment for Flash Tutorial: Sampling and Aliasing. Overall this is very nice learning supplement, and is easier to read than the text.

and read through 5.3.1 Mathematics and Algorithms for Aliasing. I could pretty much tell the algorithm when I was trying out the Flash Tutorial Sampling and Aliasing, but the Nyquist and Aliasing one demonstrates the algorithm much better.

Personal preference:

Can we horizontally line up Figure 5.9 and 5.10 and adjust the table contains Figure 5.11 and 5.12? It just looks quite messed up.

June 20

After what feels like an extremely long weekend, we are back and working our way through Chapter 5. In all honesty, this chapter is a little tough for me to get through, as it is full of math and equations, and is a rough jump from the very comfortable chapter 3 material. In order to not get bored, I've been working through my setting of "Day". It might seem like a bit of a suck-up move, but honestly I've become much more fluent with Finale after working on a composition, and certainly have some ideas on how to incorporate my work with the other software programs we're using. What I'd like to figure out is how to comfortably record my finale work into an MP3 in order to save the track and work on the composition later. I'd also love to print.... do we have a printer around?

5.1 sections

5.1.1 - Analog vs. Digital

This is an easy to understand section. The content makes sense and sets up the important concepts for the rest of the chapter.

5.1.2.1 - Two Steps: Sampling and Quantization

I find it annoying that a term (Hertz) can be used with different meanings, but I know nothing can be done about that here. I found sampling and quantization to be relatively straight forward. If the difference between continuous and discrete is understood, I feel like sampling and quantization will make sense to the student.

5.1.2.2 - Sampling and Aliasing

I thought this section was easy to understand as well. The computer must select points to sample, and enough points must be sampled to create a decently accurate digitized version of the track. This requires the use of the Nyquist Theorem, or else the sample won't be accurate enough. I think it is pretty straight-forward.

Error on page 5. It says "The value of these high sampling rates will be discussed in section 4.2." Since this is in chapter 5, it should say "The value of these high sampling rates were discussed in 4.2."

5.1.2.3 - Bit Depth and Quantization Error

If you want the music majors to really understand binary, there needs to be a good lecture on binary. Elizabeth was still confused about it after reading, so I tried to explain it to her (hopefully my awful teaching made enough sense to make binary a little more clear). Once you understand it binary is pretty easy, but it takes a bit of work to learn it. Bit depth is a little confusing, but I feel like the supplements do a pretty decent job explaining it. Assuming this is what actually happens, figure 5.6 also clears this concept up by showing the positive and negative values for the bit depth. The reason that quantization occurs also makes a lot of sense, especially with the help of the different related figures.

5.1.2.4 - Dynamic Range

I'm not a big fan of this section. It gets a bit dry after a while, and after reading a few times, I'm still not sure if I fully understand what dynamic range is in this context. A lecture on this might help, but the text and supplement standing by themselves don't give a great explanation of the concept.

There is another error here at the end of the section on page 12. It again says "will be further discussed in chapter 4."

5.1.2.5 - Audio Dithering and Noise Shaping

Audio dithering is simple enough, but noise-shaping is a little bit confusing. I feel like a visual representation of this would be beneficial.

5.1.3.1 - Audio Data Streams and Transmission Protocols

Discussions of the different accessories required for sound production like this section can be a bit boring sometimes. This section clearly explains what the S/PDIF does and the better qualities of the AES3, but I don't really have much more to say about this section.

There is a typo at the top of page 15. The second "meters" is spelled "meteres."

5.1.3.2 - Signal Path in a Audio Recording System

The discussion of buffer size in this section is interesting and quite relevant. It is helpful to understand why the sound cuts out every once in a while. Many of the computer science majors will probably already know this information, but a clear explanation of what is happening is quite helpful and the music majors probably don't know this info. It is also very practical to what is going on in the class. Selecting the right buffer and sampling size to create the best sound capturing is crucial to successful digital music creation.

5.1.3.3 - Digital Audio File Types

This was an interesting section, I thought. I've always been curious about what the actual difference is between the different music file formats. I found the discussion of compression to be interesting and informative. It was easy to understand and fun to learn about. Even though compression makes sense and the reasons that data can be lost during the process are easy to understand, I also though the supplement helped with understanding even more. I thought it was a pretty good supplement.

On page 19, a little bit of the bottom of the aside is covering some of the text. It is just the very top of a few letters, but I'm sure it would be pretty easy to fix.

Chapter 3 Musical Sound: Section 3.1.6 - 3.2

This is the last day of this week, and I finally finished up Chapter 3. I have to admit that it takes time to digest the material covered, but what is more challenging to me is to grow a good sense of music.

First I want to appreciate Elizabeth and Erica’s help in the last two days. Music notation does seem intimidating to me. I had a hard time absorbing the information, and had to reread the same sentence again and again to understand. I think both of the music students had experience in teaching/tutoring music theory, and they demonstrated and explained the basic concepts very well. I do hope this kind of collaboration will occur more during the rest of the project. While I was evaluating the learning supplements yesterday, Elizabeth helped me with understanding concept of chords and inversion, as well as familiarizing with the notes with accidentals that each key signature represents. With their help, I reread 3.1.6 Musical Composition more thoroughly, and understand the basic principle of musical composition. Today when I start playing with Finale, I feel much more confident than a week ago, at least I have a sense of what I am doing now.

I would say 3.1.6 and 3.2.1 are the most successfully written part of this chapter (3.2.1 is the only subsection in 3.2; why don’t we just have 3.2 instead?). Section 3.1.6 gives detailed information on each topic, while 3.2 lets us have a little bit taste of everything. With the music students’ help, I am much clearer with the concept of different kinds of intervals, and how they affect the naming and effect of chords. Section 3.2.1 introduces the reader different expression of music notes. I found the various formats are quite interesting, especially the event list. It is very compsci-ish, easy to be seen as a database that each element can be fetched and edited easily. I am very looking forward to going through the chapter on digitalization, and hopefully get to know exactly how digital sounds are made and stored.

Software-wise, I found looping in Audition comes very handy. Audition is the software that makes the most sense to me so far (-___ - …struggling…). The interface is very user friendly. It is fairly easy to just pull in a piece of sample and edit it. The only problem is when I was exiting Audition my computer froze for 5 minutes and muted. Finale would be very helpful to the ones who can compose. I just tried to type in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, saved, and reloaded it, making sure it works on my computer. Hope I will finish the reading earlier next week, so I will have more time playing with the softwares.

I did not try out the section on science, math, and algorithm this time. The MATLAB one seems of not much value to work on. But the Max one appears very appealing. I might try it on leisure time later.