Practical seminar Creating a simple electroacoustic piece in easy stages

You are viewing an archived web page, collected at the request of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) using Archive-It. This page was captured on 07:51:59 Dec 16, 2015, and is part of the UNESCO collection. The information on this web page may be out of date. See All versions of this archived page.

Loading media information hide

UNESCO.ORG

The Organization

Education

Natural Sciences

Social Sciences

Culture

Communication & Information

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.