Digital Music Lab and course sound good to techno-savvy students
BY RACHELLE COOPER
Unless you're playing an instrument or listening to live music, there's no aspect of the musical experience these days that isn't affected by computers, says Prof. Jim Harley, Fine Art and Music.
“Every CD is made with digital technology, and there are whole genres of music — rap, hip hop, techno, dance — created entirely on the computer.”
Digital music was first created in the late 1950s when Max Matthews, a New Jersey Bell Labs employee, developed a programming language oriented to turning digital signals into sound.
“In 1961, Max Matthews produced a demo of a computer actually singing the song Bicycle Built for Two,” says Harley. “Now, we take it for granted, but that was totally mind-boggling at the time.”
U of G has kept up with the latest technology in music by opening a Digital Music Laboratory last year. The “Creating Music on the Computer” course run in the lab is extremely popular, says Harley, who spent five years teaching music technology at Minnesota State University Moorhead before arriving at Guelph this summer.
His position was created to develop new courses around the lab, and he's hoping to offer advanced classes that will allow students to make new sounds on the computer through software synthesis or signal processing.
Harley says he's especially interested in finding ways to integrate the computer into performance.
“Interactive music is a growing field. The idea of integrating a live musician into the expanded sound world of amplified electronics has been difficult in the past because the only way it could be done was to have the other sounds on a tape or CD. That meant the musician was stuck following something that was pre-produced. Now, there can be an interaction between the live musician and computer because the computer can be triggered by the musician or react to the incoming signals.”
Harley's interest in electronic music began while he was attending high school in British Columbia.
“I started creating electronic music with an old analogue synthesizer that I played in a rock band. I could create new kinds of sounds and slide them around.”
During his undergraduate years at Western Washington University, he worked in an electronic music studio. From there, he went to London, England, to study at the Royal Academy of Music and then spent two years working in a specialized computer music centre in Paris.
Harley's knowledge of digital music took a giant leap forward when he wanted to work out compositional procedures that would be a lot easier to explore with a computer but couldn't find a program to suit his needs.
“I needed to write my own programs to do compositional procedures, but I didn't have a background in programming at all.”
To take his compositional development to the next step, he enrolled in a doctoral program in music at McGill University.
There isn't an instrument that Harley doesn't compose music for, but he says he's written a lot for flute and percussion because of his association with particular musicians and ensembles. He describes his compositions as being experimental contemporary.
On Dec. 3, his colleague Prof. Ellen Waterman will perform one of his flute compositions at the School of Fine Art and Music's faculty recital at the River Run Centre.
Harley will also be showcasing his interactive audio installation Wild Fruits in the centre's lobby that night. It's an educational project that lets people play bird song samples from the keys on a keyboard, allowing them to create their own bird chorus. He originally created the installation for the regional science centre in Moorhead.
Making creative use of natural recorded sounds has been a focus of Harley's work for the last few years.
“If you're sensitized to the environment, like at dawn when the birds awaken or at dusk when they return to roost, it's an amazing sound world,” he says. “It's fun to focus on that, but you discover when you're out there trying to record that it's hard to isolate each sound.”
Harley never stops learning about digital music. Most recently, he attended the International Computer Music Conference in Miami, where he acquired more information about acoustics, composition and interactive tools for digital music.
Most students enrolled in his course in the Digital Music Lab need no introduction to using computers to create music, but Harley is quick to point out that there's a big difference in the quality of the production between students with and without musical backgrounds.
“To make really good music on the computer, you need to be fluent in music, but you also need to have some technical ability to work with the tools. If your ear doesn't know what sounds good, the computer won't help with that.”
