by Dan Wellman
The Special Interest Group for Computer Music is dedicated to increase the discussion, production, and performance of electronic and computer music on campus. This school year has been busy for us, and we hope to keep it that way! In fall we met with professors such as Professor Lippold Haken, who discussed sound synthesis research, and Professors James Beauchamp and Sever Tipei of the School of Music's Computer Music Project, who showed us how computer music is created in a university research setting. We unearthed a SigMusic project of old, the PowerGlove interface to the Maestro PC composition software which lets a user compose music by wearing a Nintendo PowerGlove and waving their hands to and fro. We've also hosted two presentations on introductions to computer music.
Our big event last semester was the first ever Sounds & Visions concert. In collaboration with SigGraph, we produced a concert experience mixing electronic music and computer-generated graphics. The music was created on everything from Macs to PCs to synthesizers, with sequencing programs, custom software, and even fractal algorithms. SigGraph studied the music, then used Silicon Graphics computers to create interpretive images to fit the songs, including flocking birds, atom simulations, fractal images, morphing solids, and a 3D scan of a human head. You can see this material in the EOH Computer Science Central Exhibit, so drop by and learn how the music was made while experiencing an out-of-this-world performance! Look for another Sounds & Visions concert with all new music and art on April 19th, at 8:00 PM in room 1320, Digital Computer Lab. All are welcome to this free concert!
SigMusic has also been working on some programming projects, one of which you can see here at EOH. A vocoder is an effect which sounds something like a talking robot, heard often in pop songs and sci-fi movies. This algorithm takes two input signals, usually a synthesizer tone and a human voice, and then lets one modulate the other's frequency and amplitude content. We're using a PC to perform this transformation, a stereo sound card to digitize the incoming signals, and the computer to apply the effects and output the signal back to speakers. Students of all backgrounds and experience levels worked on this project, from learning about the theory and designing an informative web page, to actually implementing the code.
We're also studying the fundamentals of MIDI, the communications protocol used in all modern electronic instruments. Topics include the bare-bones facts on MIDI, from hardware design to analyzing the instruction code language byte-by-byte. With this knowledge, we hope to create a program which performs some simple tricks such as reversing the scale on a keyboard.
SigMusic meets every week on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM in room 1102 at DCL. Stop by our web pages at http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigmusic/ to learn more about our concerts, activities, and projects, or send e-mail to sigmusic@uiuc.edu. New members are always welcome, regardless of major or previous experience, so drop by and introduce yourself!