Music technology offers wonderful creative options for meeting National Standard 4, Composing and Improvising. Notation software allows kids to input and edit music and get immediate aural feedback, and it automatically conforms everything to the conventions of printed music. Various MIDI and loop-based sequencing applications open up a wide range of expressive possibilities to students at all levels. Instructional software such as MakeMusic's Making Music and Harmonic Vision's Music Ace offer fun, novel compositional activities so that even the youngest learners in school can have a positive experience creating music.

FIG. 1: HammerHead Rhythm Station is a Windows freeware pattern sequencer used to great effect in Girard’s high school recording-technology elective.

Today's recording technology, however, is used primarily for documenting and producing music and is often overlooked as a tool for composing music. That is partly because we often work with a limited definition of music.

In the 1950s, amid many trends that questioned tradition, composers like Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Leuning created music by fiddling with the magnetic tape on Columbia University's newly acquired Ampex tape decks. Other challenges by composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and, earlier, Edgard Varese, led to a radically new definition of music as “organized sound.” There's much to learn about the nature of musical art from this experimental period, which occurred well before PCs, software sequencers, and samplers became commonplace.

Whether in a middle-school general classroom or a high school technology course, today's digital audio tools are perfect for exploring the compositional techniques used by the pioneers of electronic art music. More than 50 years after the advent of musique concrète, the techniques themselves are still largely the same. But what used to be done with magnetic tape, a razor, and a splicing block is now accomplished inside a graphic waveform editor, with a mouse. And today's computers are more than adequate to execute the signal processing previously assigned to room-sized mainframe computers.

Last year, Boston's Northeastern University initiated an annual electronic-music composition contest for high school students (see www.musictech.neu.edu/compcontest.html), evidence of the timeliness of projects that reexamine the aesthetic of modern electronic music. If you give your students the opportunity, you'll rediscover together all that was interesting and compelling about this creative period in music's not-too-distant past.

We'll examine ways that you and your students can undertake composition projects that use recording technology, while looking back to the pioneers of electronic music for inspiration and instruction. The common denominator between the case studies that we'll consider is that they use technology to give students the opportunity to compose music apart from the rules of traditional, Western classical music, thereby freeing them to create expressive and interesting works.

To give kids the skills and aesthetic understanding required to meaningfully participate in a comprehensive, electronic art music composition unit using recording technology, include some form of each of several elements.

The first element consists of projects designed to give students technical instruction and experiences with the tools they'll use. Jon Savage, now a music education professor at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, used recording and signal-processing units to teach composition to seventh- through ninth-year students in his former position at Debenham High School. At Debenham, Savage's students worked on compositions with recording technology during a five-week unit in their seventh year (equivalent to eighth grade in the United States) general-music course.

The first activities in which the students engaged were basic, and covered rules for using the equipment. In the first session, students learned how to use a microphone, then passed one around to “perform” their names for one another. Later, the microphone was connected to an effects unit that students were shown how to operate. Students explored how the sound processor could change the original sound, then categorized these changes as time based (reverb and delay, for example) and timbre based (ring modulation and filters, among others). To see detailed lesson plans and more, visit Savage's Web site at www.jsavage.org.uk.

David Timony teaches a high school recording-technology course at Philadelphia's Girard College, a private school for exceptional but disadvantaged students. Two overarching concerns guide Timony's teaching. First, he takes students from where they are musically — generally, immersed in hip-hop, pop, and rap — and guides them toward the broader aesthetic of electronic art music. Second, he provokes and challenges them to reevaluate and redefine their understanding of the nature of music.

Timony's Recording Technology course for 11th and 12th graders uses a spoken-word project, a narrative/voice-over (think audio books on tape), to get the basics early on. Students commandeer practice rooms as isolation booths and work with a microphone and Tascam 424 MKIII 4-track cassette recorder. Using a multitrack recorder allows students to add layers of Foley-style sound effects.

Timony exploits the idea of combining recording technology with sequencing and synthesis but without getting too complicated. He uses a freeware pattern sequencer, initially working with Bram Bos's HammerHead Rhythm Station and later with its shareware successor, Tuareg (or Tu2). These Windows programs include their own soft-synth instruments and allow users to load samples. HammerHead, which brings to mind a Roland TR-808 drum machine on steroids, can be downloaded at any number of freeware download sites, and Tu2 is available at www.brambos.com. Both have drum-machine and piano-roll components for creating rhythmic and melodic content. You can apply an array of filters and effects and can export (convert) files to common audio formats.

Timony's students work first on creating simple drum loops with HammerHead (see Fig. 1). Later, he shows them how found sounds, captured with portable MiniDisc (MD) recorders, can be transferred into waveform-editing software and prepared (trimmed and normalized, for example) as samples. Coming full circle, students are then charged with creating a step sequence using only found sounds, sampled and imported into Tu2. As Timony puts it, “I tell them to make something musical without using musical instruments.”

Dan Hosken of California State University, Northridge (CSUN), uses principles of composition to help students give shape to their creative works in a sound-design course he teaches. At CSUN, where interdisciplinary art is emphasized, Hosken enjoys working with the mixture of art, theater, TV, and music majors who populate his Sound Design for Multimedia course. Their first assignment is something Hosken calls the “Whoosh/Slam Project.” Students organize and treat in a musical way a number of sound effects (such as blowing wind and door slams) by importing them into Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer digital audio sequencer. Key operations of the tape-music period, such as splicing, layering, volume changes, pitch shift, and time stretching, are explored (see Web example 1).

Whether you decide to implement a digital-audio composition unit with middle-school general-music students or high school music-technology students, you will need to start by engaging them with the mind-broadening, aesthetic question, “What is music?” It's important that students enlarge their understanding of musical expression. Listening to and discussing recordings of tape, synthesizer, and computer music should help them to see beyond the traditional, Western sonic experience they've inherited.

Share pieces by composers of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, such as Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky, Charles Dodge, Otto Leuning, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, and discuss terms such as musique concrète, found sounds, and aleatoric music. More recent composers working in that tradition include Jon Appleton, Paul Lansky, Russell Pinkston, Morton Subotnik, and Maurice Wright (see the sidebar “An Extremely Abridged Discography”).

View and discuss documentaries or educational videos about the era, such as History through Art: The Twentieth Century (Part 2) or The eav History of Music (Part 2). Both films are available from Clearvue/eav.

Even better, invite a composer in your area to come and share his or her work with your students. That's what Savage did at Debenham, collaborating with a composer organization interested in educational outreach. If you're unsure where to find a composer, check out the new-music scene at nearby universities; there's bound to be someone working with electronic- or computer music there.

All along the way, whether students are listening to recordings of renowned composers or to each other's works in progress, have them keep a journal. Savage regularly wrapped up each class with diary entries to be completed in class or as homework. The following are sampled from his prompts, each of which calls upon the students to reflect and evaluate the day's work:

• Briefly describe what you were asked to do. How well do you feel that you followed the instructions that you were given?
• Did you have any particular difficulties? If so, how did you sort them out?
• Did anything go really well? If so, why?
• Are you pleased with your finished composition? List three ways that it could be improved.
• If you had to do this work again, would you do anything differently? If so, what?
• Did you enjoy this work? Why or why not?

Choosing composition projects that deemphasize traditionally notated music will help stimulate creativity and expression. Using recording technology levels the playing field for students with less-traditional music reading and performance skills.

An entire sound collage can be generated from a simple phrase or short poem. Using and processing found sounds, such as a screwdriver tapping a file cabinet, or someone biting a stalk of celery, can generate sonically interesting events in a composition. Students will love the adventure of hunting for good source material. A common instrument that sounds a limited number of notes, such as recorder or ocarina, can be transformed into content that has interesting tonal contours.

Seventh-grade student projects at Debenham included using recording and signal processing to amplify the meaning of a read poem, creating sound-collage compositions around a single mood or expression, and creating a soundtrack to support raw footage of a commercial (see Web example 2). Eighth-grade students continue with similar projects but add acoustic and electronic instruments. Ninth-grade students move on to computer-based projects with sampling and sound editing.

In Timony's course at Girard, students engage in a variety of projects in small groups. Because the class size of this elective is typically small (approximately 12 students), differentiated instruction is possible. Using HammerHead in a straightforward manner and working mostly with pop grooves, students create a commercial jingle. A soundscape production challenges students to tell a story via sound, without words. Here, students begin to merge their work with the pattern sequencer, portable recorders, and 4-track cassette studio.

Finally, having acquired various skills, the year culminates with an electronic composition. In that project, students use Tu2 more expressively and incorporate effects and filters on individual segments and on the work as a whole. They combine tonal and atonal note sequences with complex rhythms in the piano roll, and assign pitched and other sonic events to drum-machine sequences. It's easy to imagine how this combination of technology could yield works in the tradition of Jon Appleton and Paul Lansky.

For their final project, Hosken allows his sound-design students to choose between what he calls a “sound piece,” built from a small collection of sounds, and a “text/voice” piece, which uses a reading. Students must record all source sounds themselves. Hosken, who is a composer, guides students by highlighting important considerations. If the sounds in a collage are too similar, the piece will lack variety; if they are too different, it will lack cohesiveness. For the text piece, he suggests recording several versions of the reading with different expression. For both projects, students must map out how the composition unfolds in terms of properties such as source sounds (timbre), texture (collage, mosaic, ambient, event-oriented, or beat-oriented), pitch (high/low), loudness, and articulation (see Web example 3).

In addition to the sound-processing plug-ins in Digital Performer 4, Hosken's students are encouraged to use various freeware and shareware applications to accomplish their artistic vision. For instance, a student used Tom Erbe's SoundHack to pitch-shift and time-stretch guitar sounds because he wanted the artifacts (frequency, duration, and timbre change) associated with those operations. The altered sounds were saved in SoundHack as AIFF files and then used in Digital Performer.

It's important not to get too hung up on using the “best” recording technology. Characteristics such as ingenuity, creativity, and resourcefulness are what make student projects compelling and strong. When Vladimir Ussachevsky was given responsibility for Columbia University's first Ampex tape recorder in the early 1950s, it was to record student performances, not create tape pieces. But his curiosity and creativity moved him to experiment with the tape recorder's potential for generating new sounds. Encourage students to adopt that same spirit of invention as they search for ways to produce novel and interesting sounds with whatever equipment and software is at their disposal.

The pedagogical programs I've mentioned use three basic options for recording and sound processing when putting together sound-collage compositions. But the method you choose is not that important and will probably be determined by your budget and the gear and software you already have.

FIG. 2: These novel mobile units used at Debenham High School consist of a microphone, a sound processor, and a speaker, all housed in a durable camera case.

In this scenario, students must rehearse their compositions so they can perform them from start to finish. Some students perform with voice, instruments, and sound effects, while others process the sounds. A microphone is connected to an effects unit, the output of which goes to a monitor speaker. This method forces students to become familiar with the controls and settings on the effects unit, so they can accurately reproduce events in their piece in multiple performances.

This strategy was used at Debenham in a novel way. Savage assembled several portable studios for students to use as they worked in small groups. Each unit consisted of a microphone plugged into a Zoom 1204 signal processor whose output was sent to a monitor speaker (see Fig. 2). Savage notes that students had to learn quickly about avoiding feedback!

Students use a microphone (built-in or external) and a recording device such as MiniDisc, DAT, or analog cassette tape to record source material. They then have the option of transferring the recording to a computer for waveform editing and sound processing. Using portable recording gear increases the fun and adventure of seeking and capturing found sounds. Timony's students, working in teams with portable MiniDisc recorders and multitrack cassette decks, used this scheme early in the year.

Once transferred to a computer, source material can be edited, organized, and processed using the waveform editor's onboard or plug-in effects. In a multitrack environment, other material, such as loops and real-time instrumental performances (for example, synth keyboards or acoustic instruments), can be mixed in and manipulated.

Most MD units offer two options for transferring recorded material to a computer. If both your computer and your MD have digital audio connections (typically using S/PDIF format), you can move the material directly to the computer with no loss of quality. Several companies make audio interfaces for computers; these allow you to connect the output of your recording device to a computer's USB or FireWire port. You can also just connect the recorder's audio output to the computer's audio input, and set the latter to record at line level. Use any audio-recording program to capture the signal.

Other schemes are possible but, in my opinion, aren't worth the distracting steps you'll have to take.

The built-in microphone on my personal and school computers is adequate for student sound projects, but perhaps you already have an audio interface and microphone that you can use. At CSUN, Hosken records directly into Digital Performer with a Shure SM57 microphone (which he praises for durability) and a MOTU 828 audio interface.

FIG. 3: Audio tracks in Cakewalk Sonar can be spliced, moved, copied, and transformed by plug-ins. Volume, pan, and effects are automated by drawing envelopes.

Recorded events can easily be edited and organized, and plug-in effects can be inserted and monitored as students record. You can use a 2-track audio editor such as RBF's MED SoundStudio (Windows) or BIAS Peak (or Peak LE) for Mac; a multitrack audio editor such as Adobe Audition (Windows), Steinberg Wave Lab (Windows), or BIAS Deck (Mac); or a digital audio sequencer such as Steinberg Cubage SE (Mac/Win), Cakewalk Home Studio (Windows), MOTU Digital Performer (Mac), or Apple Garage Band (Mac). In a multitrack environment, students can orchestrate layers of sound and control them by drawing automated volume and pan envelopes (see Fig. 3).

The most economical recording scheme is to use a freeware or shareware audio editor. Some of these products have surprisingly rich feature sets.

Many of the terms we now use with digital audio come from the days of working with analog tape. A cut was made with a razor, and a splice involved using specialized splicing tape to connect two separate pieces of audiotape. These procedures and many more are now available to students using music software.

Here are some basic operations to explore if your kids are using a waveform editor to prepare their compositions:

An alternative to normalizing is for students to apply compression to squash the high peaks (reducing the dynamic range of the signal), then increase the gain to raise the strength of the overall signal.

Use these functions just as you would when editing text in a text editor. Highlight the part of the waveform you want to work with, and choose the operation you want from the Edit menu.

Fades are entered by selecting an area of the signal and choosing the command from a menu, or by graphically entering volume changes. Crossfade brings down the level of one signal while increasing that of another.

This procedure raises the level of the highest peak to 0 dB, and then raises all other parts of the signal by the same proportion. Normalizing is useful when a signal has been recorded at too low a level or when the volume is inconsistent throughout.

When the audio signal is reversed, interesting sounds can result. (A reverse cymbal is even part of the General MIDI sound set.) Select the part of the waveform you want to reverse, and use the reverse tool if available.

FIG. 4: A Plate plug-in is inserted using drop-down menus in Digital Performer’s Mixer window.

Break apart a continuous signal into smaller fragments. For instance, use Splice with a spoken-word recording to divide it into smaller parts (phrases or words) and then, perhaps, reorganize it.

In the old days, adding effects like reverb and distortion used to mean sending the signal to separate hardware modules for processing or undergoing computationally intense operations on large mainframe computers prior to playback. With digital audio plug-ins, numerous effects can be added easily, inexpensively, and in real time. If your kids are developing their projects within a waveform editor, they'll rely on audio plug-ins from within that application (either included with the program or added separately) to process their source material and deliver interesting sonic results.

Although effects can be applied to the signal after recording, most of the time you'll want your students to hear (monitor) the result that a plug-in has on the sound as they're recording it. If your software has this option (and not all do), follow the steps below, which should work for most any program (instructions in parenthesis refer to commands in Digital Performer):

1. Record-enable an audio track. (In the Tracks Overview window, click on the track's triangle-shaped Record button.)

2. Insert an audio plug-in on that track. (In the Mixer window, click and hold one of the Insert drop-down menus at the top of the record-enabled Track and choose a plug-in, as shown in Fig. 4. In the plug-in dialog box that opens, stick with or alter the settings, as shown in Fig. 5.)

3. Tell the software to monitor the record-enabled track through the plug-in. (Go to the Setup menu/Configure Audio System/Input Monitoring mode. Set that to Monitor Record-enabled Tracks Through Effects, as shown in Fig. 6.)

4. Turn on Audio Play Thru in order to hear what is being recorded. (Go to the Studio menu and choose Audio Patch Thru.)

5. Use headphones to monitor the result of the effect you apply.

Normally, students should make cut-and-paste edits before applying effects because a cut may interrupt the evolution of the effect in an awkward way. Here are some effects that you and your students will be interested in using:

FIG. 5: MOTU’s Plate plug-in window is where you alter the feature’s settings.

This time-based effect makes a single instrument sound like that of a large group.

By eliminating some of the spectral content, you can alter the timbre subtly or greatly. Depending on the plug-in, you may be able to control parameters such as the filter's center frequency, the range of the area to be attenuated (bandwidth), and the movement over time of the filtered area. This last option allows for “filter sweeps.” (In the old days, that was done via a Low Frequency Oscillator, or LFO.)

This effect produces a swooshing sound, originally accomplished by splitting the signal into two identical versions; applying a constantly varying, short delay (usually 2 to 15 ms) to the signal; and mixing the altered signal with the original. The name comes from the act of pressing a finger against the flange of a reel-to-reel tape deck's supply reel to slow it down, causing the delayed signal to be out of phase with the original.

FIG. 6: Instruct DP4 to monitor inserted effects as you record using settings in its Input Monitoring mode dialog.

Although with analog audio, these effects are different aspects of the same process, that is not the case in the digital domain. Pitch shifting is, as the name states, altering a signal's pitch. Time expansion and compression (sometimes called “time stretching”) are best explained with examples. Let's say that you have a great 12-second musical fragment, but you need to fit it into a 10-second section of a larger piece. With classic analog reel-to-reel tape decks, you can usually speed up playback so that it takes less time to play the same passage — but that increases the frequency proportionally. If you double the playback speed, you raise the pitch an octave. Similarly, if you slow down analog playback, the pitch drops.

In the digital domain, these processes can be separated. Software can accomplish transformations in one domain with no change to the other, so you can play that 12-second fragment in 10 seconds with no change in pitch, and you can raise and lower pitch without changing the length of the piece. However, your students will often enjoy the artifacts of doing it “the old-fashioned way,” and most software provides that option.

Reverberation is the decaying residual sound that remains after a sound occurs and is created by the sound's multiple reflections off of surfaces in an acoustical space. Adding electronic or acoustic reverb can liven up samples and alter the virtual acoustics of the space within which your electronic compositions exist, creating anything from subtle room ambience to the rich echo of a large stadium.

Because most plug-in effects come with presets, students can begin using them in no time. That allows them to learn about each effect through first-hand experience. Later, students can explore creating their own custom settings. A good, plain-language pocket reference about effects is Paul White's Basic Effects & Processors (Sanctuary Publishing Limited, 2000; distributed in the United States by Warner Bros.).

Is electronic art music really relevant in these postmodern times? Absolutely. To ignore early electronic art music is to miss the opportunity to point out important crosscurrents with popular music. Long before hip-hop producers appropriated their first sample, electronic tape composers were recording, editing, and arranging the spoken word and other source material. And long before the vocoder found application in the music of Cher, Shania, and many others, Max Matthews and Charles Dodge were toying with voice synthesis at Bell Laboratories. Indeed, it almost seems as though modern electronic art music has served as a research and development department for popular commercial music.

Experimentation and risk taking is fundamental to using recording technology to compose, and to teaching students to do so. Many of your kids may not have formal training on an orchestral instrument and might be challenged to perform even simple keyboard parts. But with the proper stimulation and training, they can create very interesting electronic compositions by combining the inventive spirit and musical aesthetic of a day gone by with the recording technology of our day.

Scott Watson teaches elementary band and university music technology courses in the Philadelphia area. His music for band is published by Alfred Publications and Concert Works Unlimited (a division of Shawnee Press). He can be reached at watsons@parklandsd.org.

BIAS www.bias-inc.com

Bram Bos (HammerHead) www.threechords.com/hammerhead

Bram Bos (Tuareg) www.brambos.com

Cakewalk www.cakewalk.com

Clearvue/eav www.clearvue.com

Digidesign www.digidesign.com

Felt Tip Software www.felttip.com

Harmonic Vision www.harmonicvision.com

LinPlug www.linplug.com

Make Music Inc. www.makemusic.com

Marantz us.marantz.com

MOTU (Mark of the Unicorn) www.motu.com

Propellerhead www.propellerheads.se

RBF www.medsoundstudio.com

Shure www.shure.com/microphones

Sony www.sonystyle.com

SuperScope www.superscopetechnologies.com

Tascam www.tascam.com

Tom Erbe www.soundhack.com

Zoom (Samson Technologies Corp.) www.samsontech.com

Let's face it, this is not the place to try to be comprehensive about what has happened in electronic art music in all its many forms. Nevertheless, I will take a stab at offering a basic listening library that will beautifully support the goals of this article. The following, then, are recordings that were chosen to get kid's attention and provoke stimulating conversations rather than for historical or geographical completeness.

The recordings are usually obtainable from sources such as Amazon and CDeMusic (www.cdemusic.org) in CD format, but you may have to place a bid or two on eBay.

Along with listening with your students, discuss questions such as, “What is music?” and “What role has electronic art music played in the development of all music in the 20th and 21st centuries?”

Composers Recordings, Inc. [1991] Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Leuning, Mario Davidovsky, et al. Includes Leuning's Fantasy in Space, featuring tape-manipulated recordings of flute, premiered (along with music by Ussachevsky) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in October, 1952. The event was the first concert of tape music in the United States.

Caipirinha. [1999] John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Iannis Xenakis, et al. A great survey of experimental music of the 1950s thru 1960s, including iconic pieces such as Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 1 and Subotnick's “breakout” composition Silver Apples of the Moon (1967, and available separately on a CD by Wergo). The Subotnick piece features exotic synthesized timbres and dance-inspired rhythms. Max Matthews shows off his voice-synthesis work for Bell Labs in the cute Bicycle Built for Two.

[2004] New Albion Records. Music of Charles Dodge. Includes Speech Songs, settings of poem sketches by Mark Strand, a colleague of Dodge's at Columbia. This work, which employed new speech-synthesis techniques being developed at Bell Labs in New Jersey, is probably the first piece to employ speech synthesis. Working at Bell Labs after hours with newly developed software, Dodge was able to perform complicated operations not possible with analog tape, such as changing the speed of speech without altering its pitch and changing the pitch without altering its playback speed.

[1998] New World Records. Charles Dodge, et al. Includes representative pieces by many who were attracted to this famed electronic-music facility.

Empriente Digital. [1996] Includes Newark Airport Rock by Jon Appleton (who, incidentally, was a codesigner of the legendary Synclavier). A random survey of passengers' thoughts about new electronic music yields humorous and insightful raw vocal material for this witty 1969 classic. Hip, sequenced electronics accompany responses such as “great,” “cool,” “sucks,” and “I prefer music played by musicians without computers.” Should give you something to talk about with even the most stoic students!

EMF Media. [2002] Music of Trevor Wishart. Wishart is one of the composers (part of England's Sonic Arts Network) who worked with Jon Savage's secondary students on sound-recording projects. In his 1980 Red Bird, Wishart transforms and morphs recorded source sounds magically.

Composers Recordings, Inc. [1993] Wright's Chamber Symphony for Piano and Electronic Sound receives a strong performance from Canadian virtuoso and new-music champion, Marc-Andre Hamelin, in this 2-channel CD adaptation. Wright, another younger-generation Columbia composer, showcases the expansive timbral possibilities of computer-generated sound.

Bridge. [2001] Paul Lansky. Two pieces on this 2001 album are descendants of earlier works. Ride, like his 1992 piece Night Traffic, uses recorded sounds from the road, with some processed voices, in a trek with changing sonic landscapes. After three earlier works with similar names, Idle Chatter Junior takes the idea of parsing words to a level that would amaze even Bill Clinton. Recorded voices are dissected into pieces and organized as music, forming and combined with attractive rhythmic grooves. Should give kids lots of ideas for emulating.

Composers Recordings, Inc. [1996] Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky, James Primosch, et al. The first-generation Columbia-Princeton school passes the electro-acoustic baton to Primosch (Davidovsky's student), after whose 1993 piece the album is named.