MUS 6 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Additive Synthesis, Sine Wave, Synthesizer
Musical Terminology
• Pitch:
o Pitch is the sound with a specific frequency that makes it possible to judge as low
and high in a musical sense.
• Rhythm:
o Refers to surface aspects of musical timing, including the length of notes and rests
and the pattern of attack (meter).
o How events that we perceive as separate are distributed through time
• Tempo:
o The speed at which the music is performed.
• Dynamic:
o Dynamics of music is the variation and change in the loudness between notes and
melody.
o In musical notation, some dynamics are indicated by various markings, such as p
(piano, it means soft) or f (forte, it means loud).
• Timbre:
o In short, timbre is the color (quality) of the sound. It’s what makes the quality of
sound different from another, even when they have the same pitch and amplitude.
o The content of spectrum.
o Timbre allows us to distinguish between different types of sound production or
instruments, such as guitar, piano, and trumpet.
o Even when a group of instruments are played in the same pitch, we can still tell
the difference of timbres from these instruments.
• Harmony:
o Harmony is usually referred to as the rules of chord progression, which is
basically the process of dealing with the balance between dissonant chord and
consonant chord.
• Chord:
o Created when several notes sound simultaneously
o Different quality chords convey different quality emotion
o Broad and narrow
• Scale:
o A collection and sequence of musical notes ordered by pitches in ascending and
descending direction.
▪ Different combination of pitches in scale creates a different effect.
▪ Usually, a musical work is based on the certain scale.
Acoustics Terminology
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• Frequency:
o Frequency is the speed of vibration, and it determines the highness or lowness of
the pitch.
o When the speed of vibration increases, it produces a high frequency of pitch, and
vice versa.
o Measured in Hertz
• Amplitude:
o Amplitude is the size of vibration, and it determines the loudness of the sound
(Dynamic).
o When the sound is produced in a large size of vibration, it creates a loud sound.
o How loud something is in terms of decibles.
• Spectrum:
o Except for sine wave, most of sounds are made up of a mixture of different
frequencies.
o Some frequencies in this sound is in a natural way too soft to be
perceived so that we could only tell the loudest frequency.
o Basically, the musical spectrum is a representation of a sound with the details of
each individual frequency and is usually presented as a graph.
Synthesis Techniques
• Additive Synthesis:
o In sound synthesis, additive synthesis is a way to change or create a timbre by
adding sine waves.
• Filter:
o Filter is used to alter the harmonic content of a sound, which changes its quality.
o Basically, the essential element of a filter is to eliminate certain frequencies of a
sound (see spectrum) and to allow other frequencies to pass so that the quality of
spectrum will be altered.
• Envelope:
o The sound envelope is a representation of the various level of sound over time and
is categorized as four different stages – A (attack), D (decay), S (sustain), R
(release).
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o A way that a sound changes in amplitude over time
o Like a cymbal hit
• Waveform:
o It presents various shapes of a sound signal producing by given medium. The
following are the examples of different waveforms:
• White noise:
o White noise is a noise that is produced by combining sounds of random
frequencies with equal intensity.
Genre Terms:
• Musique Concrete
o A practice of taking pre-recorded sounds of any kind, take the musical qualities
out of them and recombine them to make a piece
• Elektronischemusik
o Worked with synthesized sounds
o Influence of Serialism
o Restricted to entirely Synthetic means of sound production
o Principles
▪ Disassociation with any natural or human sound sources
▪ Total control over process of creating sound
▪ Sound material can be broken into sinusoidal components with the
following properties:
• Frequency
• Amplitude
• Phase
o
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Document Summary
The following are the examples of different waveforms: white noise, white noise is a noise that is produced by combining sounds of random frequencies with equal intensity. Genre terms: musique concrete, a practice of taking pre-recorded sounds of any kind, take the musical qualities out of them and recombine them to make a piece, elektronischemusik, worked with synthesized sounds. Improvisations, live performances: fixed pieces (can record it onto tape, synthesis, making music from scratch, either by combining waves, voltages, or through math (sine waves) on a computer, vocoder. Listening test: berio luciano (1925-2003, thema omaggio a joyce (1958) https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=-uivzvgk16c&t=6s, source material from spoken passage in italian, french, and english from james. Without its percussion the bell becomes an oboe sound : wendy carlos, music for the funeral of queen mary, orchestrated for the opening scene of. A prayer to authority kinda disturbing. Wrote this peace with that in mind.
