Computers and Music
Over centuries past, music has seen leaps and bounds in the enhancement of theory, instruments, and recording arts. The first major leap was the invention of the piano in 1709 by Bartolomeo Cristofori. From that first major step came the introduction of electronic instruments short after the harnessing of electricity which came in the early 19th century. Soon after that came recording and then on to synthesizers and eventually digital recording. As computers were introduced to society, computer music was also brought into our vision. What we are seeing today in the music industry is the use of computers and the Internet to distribute music, whereas in the past, distribution was only available via record, eight track, tape and compact disc. There are a few problems that come with the distribution of music via the Internet, mostly legal, having to do with record companies. With computers becoming a bigger and more important part of our society everyday, it is inevitable that they will affect our music more than what they have already. Computers will become even more depended upon for producing and distributing music in the future. Thaddeus Cahill took the first step in computer music in 1897 with his Dynamo
One of the formats of computer music that has taken the place of MIDI in the minds of many computer music composers is the MOD. A MOD is a file format that is made in much the same way that a multi-track recording is. The programs that MOD's are made in are called "trackers". What these allow you to do is arrange one track at a time into an individual melody of a single sample. Once you have one track finished, you can start another track and arrange another melody or possibly a beat that is played at the same time as the first track you made. With most trackers you can arrange up to 64 tracks. This enables you to create a fairly complex and detailed piece of music. MOD's are one of the only ways you can incorporate both MIDI and samples into the same piece. With the wide variety of samples available and the ability to make your own samples, MOD's allow for a wide range of musical genre's to be arranged using trackers. Just prior to the release of the DX-7, a group of musicians and music merchants met to standardize an interface by which all of these new electronic instruments could relate. Thus the musical instrumental digital interface was born, more commonly known as MIDI. Since then, computers have come far in means of speed, size and cost. Almost every home has a computer of sorts in it and almost every one of them is able to play music using MIDI components. With the recent computer craze and availability of the Internet many new music formats have been made available. Tracking programs, wav files, mp3's and real audio are a few of these. After Peter Schaeffer's work, composers became more interested in creating sounds instead of simply recording and manipulating them. This lead to the first recorded simple sine tone free of overtones. With this simple tone, methods were developed to filter, modulate and reverberate it into other sounds that mimicked instruments. This was the true beginning of computer music. Soon after this innovation came the worlds first synthesizer in 1959. Not only are computers used in the production of music, but they are also used in recording music today. Digital recording is relatively new to the music industry and is only beginning to be taught in schools for the recording arts. In older methods of recording, "waveforms of sound are inevitably distorted to some degree, and they also pick up noises from the recording process itself" . In computer based or digital recording, these problems are eliminated, the end product being very clear and distortion free. With the Internet came even more progression in computers and music. However, this development is in the way music is distributed, not produced. For a couple years after the Internet became available, there were only a few file formats that were able to hold music. These were MOD's, MIDI and wav's. A wav's is a format that allows you to record and listen to anything you can put near a microphone or play into your computer. Wav's are okay for small short sounds like movie clips or jokes, but an entire song would take up a very large amount of memory. Although they were gaining in popularity, not many people were into MIDI and MOD's. They would rather hear their favourite band on their computer. The good thing about MP3's is for the underground music scene. Many artists that want to get noticed are using MP3's to get their music listened to. Smaller bands can now gain a larger fan b
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2299
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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