Software

In the summer of 2014, I was teaching a summer course in Music Humanities, an obligatory core curriculum course for undergraduate students at Columbia University. As the session was nearing toward the end, a student asked me in class (I am paraphrasing the question here): “We’ve learned about composers and compositions, even some things about conducting and even some critical theory, but what about composing itself?”

Then it occurred to me that it would be a pity not to teach one thing or two about the creative process in music. What kind of mindset do composers have when they compose? And how does it feel like to put things together? The students seemed to be interested in seeing the “creative process” in action. They wanted to see me do something. But then I secretively thought: “Well, why not let the students themselves be the composers?” After all, if I were to teach about the art of listening, why not let the students utilize their own sense of listening into action?

So I asked the students to record some sounds in their lives that interested them. A student brought me the sound of mixing bowl stricken with a beater, while someone else brought me the sound of his own coughing. I edited them down to small bits of sound files.

I asked them also to suggest some compositional techniques that they want to see them realized in class. Some were interested in an organum, while others fugue, or even someone suggested that the emulation of Steve Reich’s Come out would be nice.

I built a patch with Max/MSP, then create an application that does a lot of what happens in the early tape music; splicing, looping, reversing, pitch/speed…, and using the sounds that they thought they were interested in, they could assemble small tape pieces.

In class, without saying a word, I demonstrated the app by improvising on it. Then I spoke some things about “inspirations” and how composers discover different possibility of any given sound that composers might be interested in. I mentioned how composing is often a dialogic process, notably in electronic music (i.e. assemble, listen/think, react (assemble), listen/think…). I gave a small tutorial as to how to operate this application, and the students were ready to go.

Then I made it so that two students pair up as a team, and each team spent about 20 minutes to create a sound track. I received the soundfiles from them, and made “The Mix.”

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my students who took the Summer Music Humanities in the summer of 2014 at Columbia University. The initial eight sound files that are contained in the app are the ones that the students recorded.

I have been using OpenMusic for the past 13 years, and it has helped me imagine bigger things in music. And now the timing seems to be right for me to empower others—younger generations of composers in particular—and help them imagine bigger things, too. There are already a few tutorial video series on this software program, but I do mine alongside the OM Tutorial Patches that come with the software program, so that the learning curve for the program is progressive and gradual, with as little bumps as possible. The advantage of such tutorial videos is that the viewers can follow along, stop them whenever they wish to try things out on their computers. I have also implemented some of my twists to encourage the students to go deeper into some of the key concepts.

I say it will, so long as composers use it with their strong creative wills! At the very least I hope it gives them yet another way to think about process of composing, and music in general. I am interested in augmenting the affordance of flexibilities in compositional thoughts to young creative minds. (Edit: I amended the answer after I had a conversation with a friend who convinced me that OpenMusic does help composers write better music!)

Anyone who downloaded OpenMusic on their computers but doesn’t know where to start! (But I would heartily recommend checking out OpenMusic’s QuickStart Guide before proceeding with my videos.) I would recommend these videos to anybody who is interested in using OpenMusic, even undergraduates. I might even say the sooner the better.

Note: You will notice that as of late October, eight tutorial videos into it, I have yet to cover the tutorial on how to export the musical materials for use in music notation software programs. I will cover it as one of the last topics in the tutorial sequence. This is because:

1. I view these initial tutorial videos as forming a skill-building tutorial sequence to get around well in OpenMusic as the viewers acquire basic skills in computer programming, and more importantly;
2. Very often what OpenMusic generates will not be immediately usable in the actual notated music. That does not mean that they aren’t useful; rather, it means that it is necessary to work the materials out further, and that is one topic that deserves one tutorial session.

I insist—at least at the early stage of learning the software—that OpenMusic is best used as a musical sketchbook, where imagination can roam wild. Working with musicians will seemingly put a leash on such imaginations, but then hopefully what OpenMusic teaches—logical thinking process among other things—will help the composers reach a higher level of music-making in the collaborative process.

Yes, yes and yes! OpenMusic itself is free, so why should I charge people? At the moment, I am very fortunately employed where teaching/research is my job, so I find it unethical to charge money, especially given the current job climate where artists are going through very difficult times. We need to help each other, don’t we?

That said, I may start Patreon if there are enough people interested in the tutorial videos and they request special contents from me. After all, video editing takes a lot of time (how do these YouTubers find time to edit all these fancy schmancy videos!? Goodness…)