1.
Introduction
2. The Musical Environment
3. Loudness and Dynamics
4. Crescendo and Diminuendo
5. Sound Envelopes
6. Foreground - Background
7. Listening Structures
8. Notating Sounds
9. The Listening Space
10. Radio Composition
11. The Design Team
Documentation Exercise
Document using words and then in your own symbols, a thirty second acoustic picture of all the sounds you hear from your environment. Try to document everything you hear within the thirty seconds.
1. Describe the sounds firstly in words, (analysis)
2. Try to visually represent the sound in a form of notation (this is called a score) of your own invention.
HINTS: Sometimes its a good idea to try to copy the sound you are hearing with your voice before you try to notate or describe it. Listen to what you are doing with your voice when copying the sound. Can you detect any subtle changes in your voice? Are there any fluctuations in the sound or is it completely constant. Are you inventing any words with onomatopoeia? For example, a door slamming may sound like the invented word: THRUMP. How would you graphically notate this sound so that you have accurately captured the subtleties of the door closing? What is its attack sustain and decay? The closer you listen, the more detail.
When notating sounds, a common procedure is to treat the horizontal axis of the page as time (duration) and the vertical axis as changes in register (i.e. high, middle, low). For example a gradually falling high 'ee' sound followed by a series of short low sounds can be represented by the following (notice use of onomatopoeia):
Loudness is often represented by thickness or size.
| For example a drum hit once would probably look like this: |  |
or |  |