Music With Byte TECHNOLOGY CREATES OPPORTUNITIES FOR ASPIRING MUSICIANS by Sean Kennedy photo by Jill Nussbaum "I have billions of colors on my palette," said first-year Coz Homyk about using a computer to make music. He's in the Music and Computers class this semester, which is offered by the Music Department each year to give U.Va. students a chance to enter the vast musical world computers make available. The computer is a relatively new tool for making music, emerging as a serious method of composition only in the last decade or so. Although popularized by electronic dance music producers, the computer is now finding its niche in several musical genres. To keep up-to-date with this development, the Music and Computers class (MUSI 339) was started a few years ago by Professor Judith Shatin, the current chair of the Music Department. This year, the class is being taught by John Gibson, who's also teaching the follow-up course, Advanced MIDI Topics (MUSI 443/543), this spring. The crux of the course is the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) sequencer, a software program that's used with a Macintosh computer and an attached keyboard synthesizer. A computer language, MIDI records every event that a student performs on the synthesizer and transmits them to its sequencer. (An event is the actual action a student performs on the keyboard and not the sound produced from that action.) The sequencer then recreates the events to produce sound. MIDI "is like a player piano," said Gibson, "which has these rolls with holes punched in them. When [the piano] plays the rolls back, the holes tell the keys when to fire." This description of events in the computer sequencer affords the student greater flexibility and creativity than traditional, computer-less methods of composing music allow. "There's quite a lot you can do with the sequencer," said Gibson. "You have a fairly vast array of sounds to work with and you can continually edit what you've got there." For example, it's easy for a musician to vary the volume of an instrument by just changing how hard he or she is playing. But to capture variations in volume and then change them or recreate them exactly over time is nearly impossible without using a MIDI sequencer. Not only can a musician systematically work on and develop a composition with MIDI, he or she can also change any of its musical aspects, like pitch or reverberation, in ways that are impossible using traditional methods of composing. Jason Pruzin, a second year, is taking the course to capitalize on the control that a MIDI sequencer offers his work with theater productions around Grounds. "MIDI is one of the fastest growing means of control for everything in light and sound," he said. "A computer can run a MIDI console [with] a synthesizer to compose music or to run a whole show. You can reproduce something exactly the same night after night." In fact, the score for the recent Drama Department production The Good Person of Sichuan was composed entirely with MIDI. Biased by dance music's appropriation of the computer, I was expecting the majority of the class to be techno-producer wannabes. But while some students are taking the course to learn how to make dancefloor-shaking grooves, many, like Pruzin, are taking it for other reasons. "I thought it would be useful in designing multimedia products," said Nina Tisch, an instructional technology graduate student in the Education School. Having nearly completed the course, she's found that MIDI would indeed aid her in multimedia work. Also, Tisch, who has an M.A. in music composition, said she's learned "what I need to know to create better demos of my songs." Homyk recently got into producing music on a computer. When he saw the Music and Computers class in the course offering directory this summer, he knew "it was right up my alley." He said that MIDI gives him more to work with when composing a song than just a guitar or piano alone. "I know I'm going to be going back to the Macintosh lab in the music library after this course is over." Gibson emphasized his concern about the lack of women in the class: of the 30 students this semester, less than five are female. "One of our goals is to increase the enrollment of women students," he said, "because typically, for whatever stupid reasons, they tend not to want to take a course like this that sort of sounds like a bunch of geeky guys sitting around with computers. But we want more women in the course because they're every bit as capable of doing interesting work as the men are." However, Tisch, who said she shared Gibson's concern, pointed out that "unfortunately, there are many fields with a dearth of women. Even in the area of music composition, women composers are few and far between." To any women interested in music and computers, she said, "Go for it!" Any criticism of the course was hard to come by. Pruzin said he wished "it could be a little more hands-on in class, but that would require more equipment availability." This spring's Advanced MIDI Topics course, though, is all about hands-on work, since the enrollment will be much lower than the Music and Computers class. Students will also get to use more tools in their compositions, like samplers and effects boxes, which will increase the potential for creativity all the more. So, instead of checking your email or typing a paper, take a lesson from the Music and Computers class and explore the brave new world available to you by using a computer to make music. As Tisch said, "You don't have to be a composer or a computer geek to love the musical freedom that opens up for you when you give yourself the opportunity to learn about music and computers."

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