Survey of Music Technology with Jason Freeman by Georgia Institute of Technology

Key Takeaways

hi my name is Jason Freeman and I'm a professor in the School of Music at Georgia Tech as a composer I use technology to create collaborative musical experiences that link composers performers improvisers even audience members together in new and unusual ways as a computer music researcher I develop new software like programming languages or apps that support these new models of musical creativity I believe that music technology is fundamentally two interrelated fields the first is making music with technology and the second is creating new tools that transform the ways in which we create perform and experience music behind both of these areas making music making tools there's a common set core knowledge this course focuses on both of these areas making music and making tools by focusing on this core knowledge it's essential to success in both of them the acoustics of sound and a psycho acoustics of how we perceive sound the way in which sound is represented digitally on a computer and the ways in which computers can synthesize new sounds from scratch and transform existing sounds and the ways in which computer algorithms can help us to compose music and listen to music in new ways this is a hands-on course and so will actually be creating music will be using digital audio workstation or daww software da w's are the dominant paradigm and music production and have been for at least two decades if you've ever seen a program like apples GarageBand or Ableton is live or avid pro tools then you've seen a daww program in action will also be writing short computer programs in the Python programming language that extend the capabilities of the daww so that it can transform and create sounds and also compose and listen to music in new ways Python as you may know is one of the most popular programming languages in the world right now the course is organized into a series of week-long modules each module includes several lecture videos as well as a short quiz in a short project there are absolutely no prerequisites to this course whatsoever you do not need to be able to perform on a musical instrument you do not need to be able to compose music you not need to be able to read music notation if you've ever used a daww program like garageband before that's a big plus if you've ever programmed before in any programming language at all that's a big plus as well but if you haven't done those things it's fine to will teach you what you need to know along the way will also provide you the software you need to complete the projects for the course that software will run on any recent Mac or Windows machine I'm really excited about this music technology course and about exploring together with you all the ways that we could create new music and create interesting new tools with technology I hope you'll join me