by Dan Wellman

The Special Interest Group for Computer Music is the ACM's group for people who have ever had an interest in computers, music, and sound. Whether you're a beginner who wants to see how the music magic is worked or an experienced user who always wanted to build that special project, SigMusic is the place to be.

Our Fall '95 Concert is upon us!! Bring all your friends to the SigMusic Concert on Wednesday, November 29th in lecture hall 1320 Digital Computer Lab, 8:00 PM. We'll be showcasing songs written by our members, with styles ranging from fractal generated music to techno. SigGraph has been working hard to provide some psychedelic visuals to make this concert an experience for the ears, eyes, and karma.

Over the past month we've attended some cool lectures by professors on campus. Professor Lippold Haken gave us a tour of his lab, including some impressive pitch shifting demos and examples of some algorithms which make instruments "talk" like humans. We also met in the Music Building's Computer Music Project lab with Professors James Beauchamp and Sever Tipei and learned about the computer music classes offered plus got to hear some student compositions.

If you program, join our vocoder development team. A vocoder is an effect which takes two input sources, typically a human voice and a synthesizer tone, and makes the synth "speak" your words. Our destination platform is a Pentium PC with a SoundBlaster, and we need people to write C code, assembly, sound routines and Fast Fourier transformations. If you're interested in learning about how these things work or are a pro and want to hone your skills, join our team!

In November we'll be holding some beginner workshops on computer music. On Nov. 1st we'll be learning what this MIDI beast is and see how you can get a computer and a synthesizer to talk to each other and make music. Nov. 8th we'll be looking at ScreamTracker, the free solution for closet music tinkerers. As usual, new members are always welcome to our meetings!

SigMusic meets on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM in front of the ACM Office (1225 Digital Computer Lab) and then typically heads on over to 1102 DCL. Send e-mail to sigmusic@uiuc.edu for more info, as our workshops will probably be in different locations. "Resistance is futile, you will be amplitude modulated." (OK, enough cheap humor.. grumble grumble).