Music Technology

This class is an introductory survey of the fundamental aspects of music technology as it relates to music composition, performance, analysis, teaching, and research. Skills and concepts learned in this course will provide a foundation and basic understanding of music technology necessary for application in other courses of the music curriculum (i.e. theory, history, performance, and music education). This course provides a basic overview of digital audio, computer-generated notation, and MIDI. Ultimately, they will investigate how technology enhancements offer musicians ways to create music in more meaningful and musical ways.

Learning Goals and Objectives:

This course is designed to meet the following goals:

• provide a conceptual overview of music technology.

• give a broad perspective of the many ways technology is used in music applications

• provide basic skills in music technology for use with music software applications, such as music writing, recording, computer-assisted instruction, and MIDI.

• provide basic skills and concepts for using Internet music resources and communicating via the Internet This course has the following objectives:

• To understand and articulate fundamental issues underlying the use of technology in music

• To perform drill tasks with computer-assisted instruction

Topic Schedule:

· Course introduction

· Acoustic properties of sound

· Microphone

· Digital audio theory

· Connectors and cables

· Audio file formats

· The mixing console

· Introduction to MIDI

· Intro to the digital audio workstation DAW (Logic X Pro, ProTools, FL Studio, Reason etc)

· Dynamic processors

· Time-based effects