Computer Music (MUSC 216)

Welcome to the home page for Blair School of Music's course on Computer Music. This course is taught in the Vanderbilt University Electronic Classroom, in 120 Wilson Hall. You can find basic course information here, pointers to web sites of interest to students of computer music, and sound and graphics files pertinent to the course.

The Csound Manual On-Line
Lemur Pro On-line User's Guide
SoundHack User's Manual

Contents of this Home Page include:

General Course Information

Computer Music Resources on the Internet

Assignment Related Documents

Catalog Course Description (w/commentary)

Course Syllabus

This is the syllabus for the Spring '96 semester. You might also be interested in seeing a list of reference books available in the library as well as some available CD recordings.

Listening Assignments

About the instructor

The instructor for this course is Brian Evans. His office is located at 029 Computer Center in the Steveson Center. A brief bio is available on-line. He currently has an electronic exhibition of his Computational Art on the Web.

The Electronic Classroom (EC)

Open lab hours for the EC are scheduled most evenings and weekends. There are posted policies and procedures for EC use by Vanderbilt students.

Csound Front Page

This home page, maintained at Music Department of the University of Leeds, England, links to a variety of resources relating to the program Csound developed at the MIT Media Lab. From here you can find versions of the program, and supporting software, that will run on a variety of platforms (Mac, DOS/Windows, Unix). There is also an extremely useful hypertext version of the Csound manual here.

Computer Music Journal

This links to the CMJ ftp server. This server is maintained at Stanford University and points to many different information sources related to computer music.

MIT Media Lab sound home page

Here's the WWW home page at the MIT Media Lab Machine Listening Group. The Media Lab is the home of Csound, written by Barry Vercoe.

CERL Sound Group at UIUC

Here's the WWW home page for those crazy folks at the CERL Sound Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This is where the Lemur program was developed. Info about the program, and the people who wrote it, can be found here. They have also collected a lot of of other information relating to music and technology.

IRCAM

The links to the computer music research center IRCAM, located in the Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France. This is another good point of departure for access to many good computer music related info sources. (This primary IRCAM WWW server is in French.)

News Groups

There are a few news groups related to computer music, including comp.music and rec.music.synth. Music composition is discussed in rec.music.compose. The local news group vu.blair.musc216 is for students in MUSC 216 and vu.blair.comp.music is for everyone at Vanderbilt who might be interested in music and technology. Your client software should have news.vanderbilt.edu as your default news server.

Shipwreck (an example of Project 1)

Here is an example for the Project 1 assignment.

Boulanger's Tutorials (1-10)

Here are a few of the tutorials created by Richard Boulanger from the Berklee School of Music. They are seen here more or less as they appear in the Csound manual. I have added some graphic representations of the instrument designs. These tutorials are also available from the table of contents of the hypertext version of the Csound manual (sans my oh so stunning graphics, but with very helpful links).

Risset's Endless Glissando

This is an historic example of instrument design and its realization using Csound.