CSC354: Digital Sound and Music Processing Seminar
         Spring 2013, 1:10-2:30, Mon and Wed, Ford 345

Instructor - Judy A. Franklin (jfrankli at cs.smith.edu)

Textbook: on-line textbooks only
On-line texts:
  1. Pure Data community, tutorials
  2. Music and Computers - A Theoretical and Historical Approach Music and Computers by Phil Burk et al.
  3. Pure Data on en.wikipedia
  4. Programming Electronic Music in PD, Johannes Kreidler
  5. Pure Data (Manual)
  6. Dr. Rafael Hernandez Tutorial youtube movies
  7. Rasmus Berlin's tutorial pd project with lots of ideas Automata and their application to composition. Includes many subpatches for brass instruments, cymbals, etc. You do not need the java component of this, which just reads midi files.
  8. Open Sound Control
  9. Pd~graz (ed.), ed. (2006). bang. Pure Data. Wolke Verlag Hofheim. ISBN 978-3-936000-37-5. (This contains the proceedings of the First International Pd-Convention held at Graz in 2004)
  10. Puckette, Miller Smith (2007). The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music. World Scientific, Singapore. ISBN 978-981-270-541-9. (Not a book about Pure Data per se, but all examples in the book are in Pd)
  11. Farnell, Andy, Designing Sound (abridged pdf and code and sound examples).
  12. Readoholic: E-books on Pd – Pure Data, where many of these links are found.
Office Hours: Fri 1:10-2:30 or by appt. (email jfrankli@cs.smith.edu).

csc354 focuses on areas of sound/music manipulation that overlap significantly with computer science disciplines. Topics are digital manipulation of sound; formal models of machines and languages to analyze and generate sound and music; and algorithms and techniques from artificial intelligence for music composition. This is a hands-on course in which music is actively generated via programming projects and includes a final installation or demonstration. Prerequisites are 111, 212, and 250 or permission of the instructor.

Focus: areas of sound/music manipulation that overlap with computer science disciplines.
  • Knowledge of sound and music is *not* required.
  • Includes:
    • Sound synthesis
    • Machine grammars to model and generate music.
    • Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical methods for music composition
      • Markov Chains, probabilities
      • Fractals, chaos
      • Cellular automata
    • History of computer music and its evolution with computing hardware

Course Specifications:
  • There are no exams.
  • There are exercises and a final project.
    The final project is a composition program, a report, and a presentation.
  • Students are responsible for all reading material. This will be reflected in a literature survey and other references in the final report, as well as in ongoing class discussions.
  • Grading:
    • Exercises: 35%
    • Class Presentations: 20%
    • Class Participation: 20%
    • Final Project: 25%

Course Syllabus (mutable)
Homework Assignments
--> papers
Helpful Links
Student Pages

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