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.