Making Music with Sounds

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Making Music with Sounds offers a creative introduction to the art of making sound-based music. It introduces the elements of making compositions with sounds and facilitates creativity in school age children, with the activities primarily for 11-14 year old students. 　It can also be used by people of all ages becoming acquainted with this music for the first time.

Sound-based music is defined as the art form in which the sound, rather than the musical note, is the basic unit and is closely related to electronic music and the sonic arts. The art of sound organisation can be found in a number of forms of music--in film, television, theatre, dance, and new media. Despite this, there are few materials available currently for young people to discover how to make sound-based music. This book offers a programme of development starting from aural awareness, through the discovery and organisation of potential sounds, to the means of generating and manipulating sounds to create sequences and entire works. The book's holistic pedagogical approach to composition also involves aspects related to musical understanding and appreciation, reinforced by the author's online pedagogical ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS II).

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. vii)
• Preface (p. x)
• Acknowledgements (p. vix)
• 1 Crossing the Threshold
• A Delineation of the Two Key Areas (p. 2)
• Sound-Based Music (p. 3)
• Making Music with Technology (p. 5)
• The Book's Approach (p. 6)
• An Overview of Selected Genres and Categories Related to Sound-Based Music (p. 7)
• 2 Discovering Music All Around Us (p. 19)
• Discovering Soundscapes (p. 20)
• A Word on Various Types of Listening (p. 22)
• Investigating Soundscapes (p. 24)
• Composing Soundscapes (p. 47)
• 3 The Sounds of Sound-Based Music (p. 52)
• Finding Real-World Sounds (p. 52)
• Recording (or Downloading) Sounds (p. 55)
• Special Case: Sounds that Sound like Notes or Groups of Notes (p. 60)
• Synthetic Sounds (p. 61)
• Sculpting with Sounds (p. 68)
• 4 Organising Sounds 1: Combining Sounds and Creating Sonic Gestures (p. 95)
• Placing Sounds in Sequences (p. 96)
• Creating Vertical Relationships between Sounds (p. 112)
• Creating, Analysing and Evaluating Sonic Gestures (p. 114)
• 5 Organising Sounds 2: Composing with Sounds (p. 127)
• Placing Sound Sequences into Structures (or Sequencing Sequences) (p. 128)
• Varying Sounds, Gestures and Sequences in Time (p. 154)
• Layering Sounds and Sequences Horizontally (p. 155)
• Spatialising Sounds (p. 158)
• To Have a Beat or Not to Have a Beat, That is an Important Question (p. 166)
• Allowing Music "to Breathe"-an Old Trick: Tension and Release (p. 167)
• Another Way of Working-Formalised Approaches (p. 170)
• A Word about Performance (p. 174)
• Making Sound Installations (p. 176)
• Analysing and Evaluating Composed Work (p. 177)
• 6 Next Steps (p. 180)
• Glossary (p. 188)
• Bibliography and Recommended Reading (p. 198)
• Index (p. 204)