Creating Music with Technology (2nd Part)

Last week's entry was more focused on improvisation. Today's post should be focused on composition and the affordances of technology to develop composition skills.

Kaschub and Smith (2009, as cited in Bauer, 2014) state that all children should be able to study composition, since:

1. it challenges children to consider their understanding of the world in new ways;
2. it allows children to exercise their generative potential in music;
3. it develops a way of knowing that complements understanding gained through other direct experiences of music;
4. and it is a process that allows the child to grow, discover, and create himself or herself through artistic and meaningful engagement with sound. 

It could be easy, however, to assume uncritically that all those benefits can only be achieved through music composition in a Western art aesthetics. Form, for example, is a constraint that may allow our students to compose successful pieces under our Western-trained ear, but if we are truly attempting to "challenge children to consider their understanding of the world" we must open our arms to diverse aesthetics, and form is one of the very cultural-specific elements of music, as it is tonal composition and perfect temperament.

The following is an example of music from India, which doubtless has a structure, but which challenges some of our Western aesthetic values such as the need for contrast or development, and the tempered tuning.

    


According to Shepherd (1977), tonality was “not generated simply from within musical forms, but was constructed and created as part of a continually developing social process.” He argues that the definitive tendency of the harmonic progressions to “progress” towards the “key note,” among other characteristics of music notation and textural developments of the period, are reflexive of and only conceivable under the perspective of the industrialized society and its notion of progress as a spacial-temporal movement towards a focal point. This perception is linked to the growing awareness of industrial man of his capacity to manipulate the environment in a specific period of time, namely his life span. In this sense, he explains, the perception of musical progress as conceived in tonality is hardly understandable from the perspective of medieval man who lived more in “a revelationary time.” It is necessary, in the light of what is discussed above, that we become aware on how the values we try to foster in our students might serve the purpose of hegemonic ideological interests.

Going back to the benefits of developing composition skills, and to entering the realm of affordances of technology within composition, Bauer (2014) states that music composition-oriented software can benefit the development of an aural vocabulary and facilitate the critique process, especially since it makes easier to obtain immediate feedback through playback capabilities. At the same time, the uncritical use of notation software can have detrimental effects on the development of audiation.

One important distinction to be made is that of composition and music literacy. The ability to create music is related directly to music literacy in terms of managing a language, but the use of language does not necessarily implies the acquisition of notation literacy. According to Bauer (2014), there are two approaches to composition regarding the need of notation. One approach is that of notation as being a prerequisite for composing. The other suggests that notation will come as needed to have a record of aspects of composition that want to be preserved and for which memory would not suffice. It is this last approach that I advocate, and the use of technology opens the door to a practice that can easily lead towards the development of some type of notation. The use of Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software allows us to manipulate sound via MIDI and digital audio.

The following link (click on the picture) will take you to an online software with both, MIDI and digital audio capabilities

and here you can see my little composition using this software

https://www.soundtrap.com/play/VhngevH_TouFrcb6KfGxlg/calamondin-jam/

In this example I used MIDI and digital audio. MIDI is not an audio format, but it is a protocol which is used to convey information that can be interpreted by MIDI capable devices and software. It can be used to control a great range of parameters using a small amount of data processing. The quality of a MIDI rendering varies depending on the way MIDI data is being used. Generally, today's computers have an audio card that is MIDI capable and can reproduce MIDI using little data processing, but the quality is not very good. There are a number of software and hardware that can render MIDI using more developed digital instruments such as VST, which quality is better, but they use more data processing.

In contrast, digital audio is a digital image of an audio signal. It is used when recording acoustic or electric instruments or your voice, and it can be thought as an extension of the process undertaken by a transducer when transforming acoustic data into electric one. In the digitalization, the electric image of the acoustic signal is transformed into binary-coded data, which has to pass the inverse process to be rendered as audio signal. Sometimes MIDI can be use to control prerecorded audio signal in the form of samples.

The use of software as Soundtrap.com gives our students access to a wide variety of music possibilities which they can manipulate in several ways to create their own compositions. They will also have immediate feedback, and in a near to professional quality. By exploration, then, our students will be developing musical composition skills and potentially notation skills. They will also be developing skills that can be very useful in the current musical industry, as a field separated from traditional classic music.