Making Music with Sounds NY: Routledge (208p, 2012).
Making Music with Sounds offers a creative introduction to the art of making sound-based music. It introduces the elements of making compositions with sounds and facilitates creativity in school-age children, with the activities primarily for 11-14-year-old students. It can also be used by people of all ages becoming acquainted with this music for the first time.
Sound-based music is defined as the art form in which the sound, rather than the musical note, is the basic unit and is closely related to electroacoustic music and the sonic arts. The art of sound organization can be found in a number of forms of music – in film, television, dance and new media. Despite this, there are few materials provided for people to discover how to make sound-based music. This book offers a program of development starting from aural awareness, through the discovery and organization of potential sounds to the means to generate and manipulate sounds to create sequences and entire works. The book’s holistic pedagogical approach to composition also involves aspects related to musical understanding and appreciation, reinforced by the authors pedagogical resource website ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS 2).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
I. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
A. A delineation of the two key areas
Sound-based music
Making music with technology
B. The book’s approach
C. An overview of selected genres and categories related to sound-based music
II. DISCOVERING MUSIC ALL AROUND US
A. Discovering soundscapes
A word on various types of listening
B. Investigating soundscapes
C. Composing soundscapes
III. THE SOUNDS OF SOUND-BASED MUSIC
A. Finding real-world sounds
Recording (or downloading) sounds
Special case: sounds that sound like notes or groups of notes
B. Synthetic sounds
C. Sculpting with sounds
IV. ORGANISING SOUNDS/1: COMBINING SOUNDS AND CREATING SONIC GESTURES
A. Placing sounds in sequences
Creating vertical relationships between sounds
B. Creating, analysing and evaluating sonic gestures
V. ORGANISING SOUNDS/2: COMPOSING WITH SOUNDS
A. Placing sound sequences into structures (or sequencing sequences)
Varying sounds, gestures and sequences in time
Layering sounds and sequences horizontally
Spatialising sounds
To have a beat or not to have a beat, that is an important question
Allowing music ‘to breathe’ – an old trick: tension and release
Another way of working – formalised approaches
A word about performance
Making sound installations
B. Analysing and evaluating composed work
VI. NEXT STEPS
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RECOMMENDED READING
INDEX