Music 680: Special Topics in Music Theory - Electronics in Performance (Fall 2006)
Class 4: October 2, 2006

computing resources in B40 and B40A
	login information
	connecting Pd to the audio interfaces

Milton Babbitt / Philomel (1964) for soprano and tape
	integrating synthetic sound, recorded voice, and voice in a single performance
		use of filters to create "speech-like" qualities in synthetic sound
	integrating drama and music through the text (and the musical interpretation of the text)

Hollander "Notes on the Text of Philomel"
	the tripartite form
		Philomel's voice emerging from the forest-scape
		Philomel's dialogue with the birds as she seeks to join their society (and the echo-song)
		Philomel "reigns over the kingdom of sound" (and unisons with the tape)
	electronic reflection and mirroring: the taped voices in counterpoint to the soprano

Babbitt "Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium"
	seeking the radical unification of time/rhythm and space/pitch through serial technique
	insisting on perceptibility as a governing aesthetic principle
		not pursuing the limits of the medium, but rather the limits of the auditor
		relying on (and the extending) the twelve-tone system as a body of technique
			because of its relative history, its relative familiarity, and thus its "verified" nature
	"the immanently temporal nature of the twelve-tone pitch-class system" (p. 111)
		(time) sequence as the crucial property of twelve-tone structure
		critique of the conventional conception of serial duration
			in which durations are viewed as multiples of some fundamental unit of duration
			doesn't correspond (or perceive) with the serial operations of transposition or interval....
		introducing the time-point concept on p. 122
			serializing onset times; duration ("interval") between events separate from event durations
			facilitates equivalent serial operations: retrograde, inversion, transposition
			relevant to the electronic medium because of the need for a small and precise basic unit
				but also through the possibility of multi-level (fractalized) structures
				but also because the electronic medium can depart from an equal-tempered pitch world
					and then similarly fractional versions of the isochronous unit

Babbitt "An Introduction to the RCA Synthesizer"
	punch-roll sequencing!
	variable frequency sawtooth oscillators
	variable amplitude enveloping
	variable resonant filtering (lowpass, bandpass, or highpass)
	multiple tremolo/amplitude modulators
	all of which can be used additively for complex spectral specifications
		and all of which can be recorded to tape for additional layering, editing, etc.
	insisting on the importance of testing by ear
		too many parameters to be amenable to serial organization
	looking to push past the "electronic 'steady-state'" sound... complex envelopes and combinations
Pd techniques
	quartic curves as an improvement on linear amplitude control
		make a curve~ abstraction for the purpose

	subtractive synthesis as an extension of the filtering techniques used in Mikrophonie I
		filtering synthetic waveforms with rich spectral content, rather than microphone inputs
			arrays with tabosc4~ as ways to create analog-style waveforms
				sawtooth recipe: 
					"; array1 sinesum 512 0.5 0.25 0.125 0.0625 0.03125 0.015625 0.0078125"
					each partial is half-amplitude of previous partial
				squarewave recipe:
					"; array1 sinesum 512 0.5 0 0.25 0 0.125 0 0.0625 0 0.03125 0 0.015625" 
					each odd partial is half-amplitude of the previous odd partial
				additively synthesizing bandlimited versions of analog waveforms to prevent aliasing
			lop~ and vcf~ as the equivalent of an analog voltage-controlled filter
			building ADSR envelope equivalents with trigger, line~

	thinking about recorded collage elements as sample playback
		soundfiler, array/table, tabplay~, tabread4~ as strategies for bringing sampled material into Pd
			driving tabread4~ using line~
			soundfiler input: "read -resize soundfile.wav array-name"