CULTURE

Practical seminar
Creating a simple electroacoustic piece in easy stages

This practical seminar offers beginners a step-by-step approach to creating a short electroacoustic piece. The creation is intended as a study piece, and only uses freeware described on the UNESCO Digi-Arts website.

Theorical sessions are also available in French.

The practical seminar is made up of seven successive sessions:

Session 1
Introduction

Session 2
Recording sounds

Session 3 
Creating the “Prelude”

Session 4
Creating Part 1, “Resonances”

Session 5
Creating Part 2, “Proliferation”

Session 6
Creating the “Coda”

Session 7
Final mix



To make the project widely accessible, the equipment and software required are as simple as possible:

  • We have used a basic, relatively old computer built around a Pentium III, 1 MHz processor, with Windows 98 and 128 MB of RAM. Whatever set-up you use, an external microphone is preferable if you wish to avoid bad sound quality and intrusive background noise.

  • An additional sound card is not essential. For this initial pedagogical exercise the one in the computer is sufficient, and will allow you to grasp the major notions of electroacoustic creation.

  • This creation only uses audio data. We have avoided MIDI data, and thus the material difficulties and costs of interfaces, pilots and keyboards.

  • The main objective is to obtain an understanding, through practice, of electroacoustic creation – of what it involves and its different stages. Once you have acquired a degree of autonomy, you can go on discovering for yourself the wealth of expression contained in the sound universe of computer music.

  • Throughout the practical seminar you will find many references to the freeware documentation and theoretical seminar available on the Digi-Arts  site.





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