Composing Music with Music Technology
Published on June 28, 2018 by maflannery
The Composing Music with Music Technology project is the result of a humanities practicum done at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), which took place in the first summer term during 2018 (term E1). At WPI, I chose music as my depth for the humanities and arts requirement. The capstone course, in this case HU 3910, has allowed me to demonstrate the skills I’ve obtained in the humanities courses I've taken up until now, while also being able to make a personal, creative, and expressive piece of music. In addition to writing a piece for four French horns and piano, I recorded each part and combined them to form the audio of the piece, with all parts playing simultaneously. Furthermore, I created a video in which the audio follows the score (which can be seen below), allowing the viewer to follow along.
"Nineteen" was conceived and brought to life entirely with technology. I wrote the piece on my iPad Pro using the Notion for iOS app, and used its playback feature (with a music library recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra) to hear it before I considered it complete. Following that I started to record myself playing each part, later to stitch them all together using GarageBand in order to play back all of the parts simultaneously, creating an audio sample of the song. Using the score and the audio I recorded, I used iMovie to create a video, which displays the score in a scrolling view format, with the audio following it, note by note. I was careful to make sure that I was precise as possible, ensuring that the video and audio lined up, all to allow the viewer to both see and hear the piece played back to him/her.
I hope you enjoy it!
More information about Notion can be found here, GarageBand here, and iMovie here.
Interested in getting a copy of the score? Send me an email at maurice@wpi.edu.
Hardware used for this project:
iPad Pro
MacBook Air
Software used for this project:
Notion by PreSonus
GarageBand by Apple
iMovie by Apple