Electronic Music 2 Exam

Front 1

The human range of sensitivity to frequency/pitch (in Herz, Hz)

Back 1

20Hz to 20,000 Hz

Front 2

The range of amplitude/loudness that is audible, but not painful to humans (in deciBels, dB)

Back 2

0 dB to 120 dB

Front 3

Reverberation

Back 3

If a sound has many very quick repetitions (less than 80 milliseconds apart), the listener hears the phenomenon of “reverberation,” or “reverb.” When one sings in the shower, the tiles reflect the sound so that it keeps bouncing around. Because most showers are rather small, the bounced sound will reach the ear very quickly so that the ear hears the original sound followed by a smear of very quick repetitions. This “smear of very quick repetitions” is called “reverberation.”

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Stereophony

Back 4

Stereophonic sound, commonly called stereo, is the reproduction of sound using two or more independent audio channels through a symmetrical configuration of loudspeakers in such a way as to create the impression of sound heard from various directions, as in natural hearing. It is often contrasted with monophonic, or "mono" sound, where audio is in the form of one channel, often centered in the sound field (analogous to a visual field).

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Panning

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Panning is the spread of a sound signal (either monaural or stereophonic pairs) into a new stereo or multi-channel sound field. A typical physical recording console pan control is a knob with a pointer which can be placed from the 8 o'clock dial position fully left to the 4 o'clock position fully right. Audio mixing software replaces the knob with an on-screen "virtual knob" or slider for each audio source track which functions identically to its counterpart on a physical mix console.

Front 6

Signal to Reverb ratio

Back 6

2:1

Front 7

Loops

Back 7

the technique of repeating a sound over and over again. The first loops were made with the locked-groove technique. This was done before tape was widely available. A groove was cut into a record (i.e. a sound was recorded to disk) but the arm of the disk-cutter was not moved during the process. So, instead of creating one long spiral groove on a record, many concentric circles could be cut, each being its own loop. This process was invented by Pierre Schaeffer in 1948. Loops were later created by splicing the beginning and ending of a small piece of recording tape together. Then, when put on a tape machine, this loop would go around and around repeating the sound over and over. This is how the loops of Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” were created. It is also how the Beatles made their loops in “Revolution No. 9” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Front 8

Cutting and splicing

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the editing of sounds in such a way as to change their order in time (usually drastically). Pierre Schaeffer did it originally by dubbing bits of sound from one recording (phonograph disk) to another. Later, this technique was performed by cutting a piece of recording tape out of a reel, and splicing (with splicing tape) that bit of recording onto another.

Front 9

Direction change

Back 9

reversing sound. One can flip a tape over, or make a record player reverse direction and play the sound backwards. Now-a-days it is even easier to reverse sounds digitally. We just ask the computer to read the sample in reverse order. Direction change is a “non-real time effect.” The pitch and timbre of a reversed sound are pretty much the same. The most noticeable effect is on the sound’s envelope (e.g. the backwards guitar solo in “Tomorrow Never Knows” sounds more like a sitar than a guitar).

Front 10

Pitch change

Back 10

achieved by altering the playback speed of a recorded sound. If, for example, you play a record that was meant to be played at 45 RPMs on a turntable set to 33 1/3 RPMs, the recording will sound lower than the original. It will also be longer. If, however, you play it at 78 RPMs, it will sound higher and be shorter than the original. Pitch change not only affects the pitch of the fundamental, but also of all of the harmonics, too. Because all of the sound is altered, it psycho-acoustically affects the perceived size of the vibrating body. Therefore, if you double the playback speed of someone’s voice, they will sound like a chipmunk, because our minds hear them as being physically smaller than the original recording.

Front 11

Tape delay

Back 11

a way to create long echoes. To put an echo on a sound in this way, one must send the sound to a tape deck where it takes a very short trip from the record-head to the playback-head and is sent off of the tape and back into the mix. The amount of time it takes the sound to go from the record head to the playback head determines the delay time (i.e. how much time there is between echoes). You can alter the delay time by changing the tape speed.

Front 12

noise floor

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is the measure of the signal created from the sum of all the noise sources and unwanted signals within a measurement system.

Front 13

Clipping (resulting in distortion)

Back 13

a form of distortion that limits a signal once it exceeds a threshold. Clipping may occur when a signal is recorded by a sensor that has constraints on the range of data it can measure, it can occur when a signal is digitized, or it can occur any other time an analog or digital signal is transformed, particularly in the presence of gain or overshoot and undershoot.

Front 14

Oscillators, and the four basic wave shapes they produce:

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-Sine wave (no overtones, very “pure” sound)
-Triangle wave (linear version of sine, has every odd harmonic--1,3,5...)
-Square wave (rectangular wave, has odd harmonics like triangle, but is brighter because the harmonics are stronger)
-Sawtooth wave (has all harmonics, brightest of four basic waveshapes)

Front 15

White noise

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sounds like very bright static. (Can be created by combining every frequency that can be heard, or by a totally random vibration or voltage)

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Musical Telegraph

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-1874
-Elisha Gray

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Singing Arc

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-1899
-William Duddell

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Telharmonium

Back 18

-Thaddeus Cahill
(Dynamophone) (1897-1906)

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Theremin

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-1920
-Leon Theremin
-first called aetherphone

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Ondes Martenot

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-1928
-Paul Hindemith

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Trautonium

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-1928
-Frierich Trautmien

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Hammond Organ

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1935
-Laurens Hammond

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Phonograph

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-referred to today as a “turntable”/tape deck
-

Front 24

“Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)”

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-1958
-Luciano Berio
-This piece is a virtuosic display of technique on a single sound source: Cathy Berbarian, soprano extordinaire, and wife of the composer.

Front 25

William’s Mix

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-John Cage
-1952
-The architect Paul William's funded John Cage for a recording project which resulted in this tape piece, composed by Cage and realized by him and several other people. Cage imagined a broad sound-world, then divided it into six categories:
A) country sounds
B) city sounds
C) electronic sounds
D) manual sounds (including acoustic musical instruments)
E) wind sounds (including singing)
F) sounds so quiet that they require amplification to be heard
The sounds were ordered by throwing three coins to generate a random sequence of numbers between 1 and 64. The end effect is a constantly vibrant experience that is continually shifting between sounds not ordinarily heard together

Front 26

Sine Music

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-Richard Maxfield
-1959
The Wiki biographical stub states that Maxfield was probably the first person to teach a university-level course in the United States. This piece was written in 1959, right around the time he was beginning to become active as a part of New York's burgeoning "Downtown" scene of the early 1960's. "Sine Music" is composed entirely of sine waves recorded to tape and then edited via cutting and splicing. There is not much in the way of signal processing here. It has a very bare-bones sound, partly because of the austere-sounding sine wave tones, and partly because the piece is composed of a "frozen chord." It is a 12-tone chord in which each of the 12 pitches in the chord is "frozen" in a particular octave (e.g. A-flat will always sound on the same place on the piano keyboard--never using the other six A-flats on the keyboard).

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Gesang der Jünglinge

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-Karlheinz Stockhausen
-1955-1957
-After his concrete "Etude" of 1953, Stockhausen spent 1954-55 on his purely electronic pieces "Studie I & II." Next, between 1955 and 1957, he wrote "Gesang Der Jünglinge," an epic masterpiece that strives to unify the seemingly opposite sound worlds of electrophonic sources and acoustic sources. The piece is comprised of electronic sounds created in the Cologne Studio and an 11 year old boy soprano. Stockhausen bridges the gap between these sound worlds by way of electronically processing the voice of the boy soprano. The text is a German translation of the Book of Daniel from the Bible. The work employs serial compositional techniques and extends to parameters other than pitch, including timbre and spacial placement. This piece was an inspiration to the Beatles ten years later, and is the reason that Stockhausen's picture appears on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

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Poeme electronique

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-Edgard Varése
-1958
Varese was a futuristic composer that is more influential than he is famous. He was a hero to many (including Frank Zappa) and continues to be. In his youth, he felt confined by the limitations of conventional acoustic instruments and predicted the coming of the electronic musical age. Toward the end of his life he was able to realize his vision of a music constructed electronically. This piece, like Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge," uses recorded acoustic sounds (transformed by Musique concrete techniques) and electronic tones. It was premiered, along with Xenakis's "Concrete-PH," in the Phillips Pavillion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The Phillips Pavillion had parabolically-shaped walls covered with 425 loudspeakers.

Front 29

Concréte-PH

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-Iannis Xenakis
-1958
This piece was composed for the Phillips Pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The Phillips Pavilion was equipped with 425 loud speakers and sounds were routed (or "panned")along trajectories across the parabolically curved walls. Fancy lights were part of the experience. The sound source for this composition is burning coal. It was assemble through innumerable tape splices. You can read about this piece and the Phillips Pavilion on p. 61 of the Chadabe text.