Topic outline

  • AXM-E6003 Composing with New Musical Instruments

    Technology has always played a central role in the evolution of musical instruments, as instrument builders adopt new equipment and methods in their work. Today, the increased use of digital technology in musical instruments, coupled with the demands of musicians to explore the potential of new instruments, has contributed to the growth of new musical practices.

    This course gives opportunity to students to learn and experiment with advanced sound processing and synthesis techniques to create novel interfaces for new musical practices. Composing with New Musical Instruments course invites students to learn how to use sensor technologies, microcontrollers, physical interfaces and thus confront fundamental concepts and technical issues faced during the process of making, building, composing and performing with new musical instruments.

    The course will be taught using the Pure Data programming environment and open-source physical computing platforms, accompanied by reading materials.


    Assessment Methods and Criteria:

    Equally important part of the course is that we dedicate half of the contact hours for project work in the classroom where the lecturer supports students by giving sufficient guidance, feedback and tutoring. Completing the course assignments is also part of the evaluation in addition to the required attendance. Students submit their project ideas / proposals and during this course they develop; their problem solving abilities, design decisions, depth of understanding through the challenges they face, aesthetic and originality of their new instruments’ sound synthesis and / or audio analysis implementation, analysis of their project components, user interface design strategies in relation to the production of the project, code design quality in terms of the ways they use computational understanding to come up and develop alternative solutions for their idea generation and project implementation. At the end of the course, students present their projects and they receive feedback / comments both from the lecturer and students. Written feedback will be provided as additional information in sisu system. Each student project work is assessed with the criteria on the above-mentioned objectives of the course.