Online courses directory (88)

This course focuses on the object itself: What does it do, what does it say? How do objects convey ideas? The shape, volume, surface and color of an object constitute its overall visual aesthetic and can communicate the object’s use, utility, significance and value. Analysis, study, exploration and refinement of 3D form, looking at a variety of methods for producing iterative study models and prototypes. Students will be introduced to relevant theoretical approaches, including semiotics, through readings and group discussions. The goal of this course is to teach students how to control the semantic, formal and aesthetic dimensions of their design work so that it communicate the story of the designer, brand or company to the intended users/consumers.

While the term “Fashion Icon” is relatively modern, fashion has always been defined and redefined by bold visionaries throughout history. Images of today's celebrities and fashion mavens are ever-present, but long before the selfie, sculpture and painting captured individuals and their fashion styling. Designers still look to these powerful sources for fashion elements and inspiration, and this course will trace the history of clothing and the way that themes have been interpreted over the last 500 years.

Starting in the 15th century, we will view the fashion biographies of notable individuals and examine garments and ‘looks’ for their trend-setting elements. Fashion is extremely and pointedly cyclical, and garment elements and design ideas that look ‘fresh’ to a certain generation can often be directly or indirectly traced to a prior moment or figure in history. In this course we will look at some of these times and people, and compare and contrast them to fashion that has emerged. Contemporary designs will be reviewed to identify the reuse or redefinition of many of these details. We will progressively develop the eye and skill to sketch and create our own ideas through a creative journaling process, culminating in an original design project based on historical elements.

Comics are one of the most popular and exciting ways to tell a story. This course offers a look at the fundamental building blocks of the comic book medium. Exploring panel to panel transitions, text to image relationships, and the intricacies of page layouts, students will examine new and innovative ways to bring their stories to life.

This course is designed for both beginning and advanced visual artists. Whether students have tried their hand at comics before or are simply interested in investigating how comics work, this course will provide insights to help storytellers make the most of every page.

Introduction to Sound and Acoustic Sketching will offer tools and practices  to inspire students to approach sound and acoustics as elements in the sketching stage of a design project.

The course provides students with foundational knowledge and practical tools to analyze and use soundscapes and acoustic impulse responses in projects. In addition, a basic taxonomy of sound terms will be introduced, allowing students to develop a language for communicating and establishing dialogues about sound with all stakeholders in an audiovisual project. The practical component of the course is anchored in exercises that allow students to experiment and assimilate the different aspects of sound and acoustic sketching, namely:

• Sound Walks – Students practice “deep listening”, “sound scripting” and sound recording;

• Sound Browsing and Retrieving – Students learn how to obtain free sounds (using the Free Online Sound Repository Freesound.com) and build up a scripted inventory in the process of sound design;

• Sound Editing – Students learn how to produce a creative sound montage based on their acoustic memory and a sound design script, using the free multi-platform sound editing software Audacity;

• Critical Sound Review – By comparing the sound sketch produced in this exercise with the actual recording of the sound walk, students can develop critical insights about the their conceptual perception and representation of an acoustic phenomena, in comparison with the factual recording of the same event;

• Acoustic Mapping by Impulse Response – Students learn how to record an acoustic impulse response from a physical space;

• Acoustic Imprinting by Convolution – Students learn how to imprint a pre-recorded acoustic response in an original audio content, producing an acoustic simulation for an architectural space, using free multi-platform sound programing environment Pure Data/Chuck.

Upon the completion of these exercises, students will produce two sound sketches: designing a soundscape based on their recollection of sound events, and simulating an acoustic space, based on analogous impulse responses from similar spaces.

Furthermore, students will gain introductory experience using the using the free online sound repository Freesound.com, the free multi-platform sound editing software Audacity and the free multi-platform sound programing environment Pure Data (or Chuck).

What inspires and influences us as artists? This course offers a unique cross-cultural comparative study of creative practice. The class will be conducted in a presentation and discussion format, and is introspective and participatory. Individually, students will share their own art-making and artistic influences across a variety of topics and be asked to examine and articulate what factors shape their values and aesthetics. As part of this, students will also be asked to document aspects of their lives as well as collect examples of art and media.

During this  five week project, students will be given a theme they will develop into a story. This story will form the basis for an original artwork produced during the class, in any medium the student chooses. At the end of the five week period, each story will be presented in the format chosen by the artist. By comparing and analyzing the work, the class will examine differences and similarities of interpretation and expression between cultures.

Project Management for Designers is intended for students who would like a broad exposure to the field of Design, with a specific interest in administration and management. This curriculum investigates the practical, business side of design: getting organized and staying on-track through timeline projections, cost estimates and workflow charts in order to ensure success and profitability. Students will study the essential paperwork – estimates, memos, model releases, change orders and contact reports – and will look at contracts and copyright issues, and when to get legal and accounting assistance. Students will also learn the principles of research, and its important role in the work of a designer. From working in a small to mid-size design studio, to more independent roles, students will gain important skills in both understanding the context and needs of designers and the field broadly, and strategies for developing administrative processes that support these practices.

The program is intended for students who already have foundational training in Design, and who are looking to move into a design field in an administrative capacity, or for designers who are interested in gaining valuable management knowledge. On completion of the modules, students will understand the principles of how to make a business work cleanly and efficiently, how to manage yourself and your workflow, and how to ensure client relationships are productive and clear.

This course introduces you to deep learning: the state-of-the-art approach to building artificial intelligence algorithms. We cover the basic components of deep learning, what it means, how it works, and develop code necessary to build various algorithms such as deep convolutional networks, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, and recurrent neural networks. A major focus of this course will be to not only understand how to build the necessary components of these algorithms, but also how to apply them for exploring creative applications. We'll see how to train a computer to recognize objects in an image and use this knowledge to drive new and interesting behaviors, from understanding the similarities and differences in large datasets and using them to self-organize, to understanding how to infinitely generate entirely new content or match the aesthetics or contents of another image. Deep learning offers enormous potential for creative applications and in this course we interrogate what's possible. Through practical applications and guided homework assignments, you'll be expected to create datasets, develop and train neural networks, explore your own media collections using existing state-of-the-art deep nets, synthesize new content from generative algorithms, and understand deep learning's potential for creating entirely new aesthetics and new ways of interacting with large amounts of data.

In today’s diverse consumer market, illustration exists through many forms of expression breaking with traditional roles of the illustrator. Through a series of projects, students will explore the translation, production and distribution of their visual ideas. Through the integration of design principles and drawing skills, students gain an opportunity to discover new possibilities for illustrated visual expression in the market.

A student should have basic drawing skills, basic digital tool skills (Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop) and understanding in fundamental design theory, in order to take this class.

This course will explore the distinct mindset and essential knowledge base vital to the establishment and success of any music-related entrepreneurial endeavor. It will highlight the notion that, whether they know it or not, musicians are natural entrepreneurs!  

   • Repurpose your skills as a musician to envision and develop a business.

   • Leverage your fundamental “multipreneurial” nature as a musician.

   • Create opportunities around your diverse musical skills.   

   • Conceive, form, launch, market, and manage a music-related business.

This free course is composed of select modules from MMI 530 Entrepreneurship for Musicians, a popular course at the Frost School of Music also offered through Frost Online. It offers a unique opportunity to experience the convenience and rewards of online learning. 

Max is a powerful platform that accommodates and connects a wide variety of tools for sound, graphics, music and interactivity using a flexible patching and programming environment. Max allows most computer users to write a simple, meaningful program within a few minutes, even with limited programming knowledge. But to do something more substantial it's necessary to approach Max as an actual programming language, by taking advantage of its various mechanisms for abstracting program elements into scalable, reusable components that can be combined in increasingly powerful ways.

This class will not cover every single capability of the language, but instead will focus on key concepts and mechanisms that will allow for tremendous new freedom and possibilities in Max. The class will touch upon:

• sound and movie playback
• sound synthesis
• sound and video effects processing
• algorithmic composition
• cross-modal mappings (e.g., video affecting audio and vice versa)
• interactive control (e.g., from QWERTY keyboard, mouse, USB devices, Open Sound Control)

Max programming, like most interesting topics, has deep aspects and shallow aspects. This course will largely focus on the deep aspects: principles, concepts, techniques, and theory. If you understand these underlying aspects, your capacity to create in Max will deepen exponentially.

At the same time, this is not just a theory class. You will also create your own projects using Max. This course will teach the minimum you need to start working on assignments, but mostly I will teach you how to learn or look up the shallow knowledge on your own using Max’s built-in documentation, the Internet, and the Kadenze course forum, as well as how to program your own tests that answer specific questions or reveal potential bugs. Working in this way, you will also develop essential skills and habits that will develop confidence and self-sufficiency, and serve you in the future.

In this course you will learn the essentials of programming real-time audio software, applying these skills to making your own audio devices, and more generally the exciting world of the Internet of Things. You will use the Raspberry Pi as a rapid prototyping platform, exploring the creative potential of real-time sensor and network interaction, combined with real-time sound generation, creating systems that respond to sensor input, communicate with other devices and play sound. Make your own musical instruments, develop devices for sonic artworks, and create new sound design concepts for sonifying everyday objects. Through this course you will develop a basic understanding of audio programming and the core concepts behind programming for the Internet of Things. You will be able to conceptualize and design your own innovative interactive devices.

In today’s digitally connected world, an engaging, distinctive website is a necessity for artists, musicians, designers, and creators. This course provides an introduction to website design and development for artists, providing the tools to create and maintain a unique online identity. In this course, you will learn how to build a custom website for your online artistic presence and portfolio, and how to leverage content management systems to develop and manage your site. You will also learn how to customize your site further with HTML, CSS, and PHP, three building blocks of the modern Web. This class will teach essential skills for designing and organizing your website, so you can create a site that is both visually distinctive and engaging. Over weekly assignments, you will develop an actual, live website from simple HTML to a full-featured site with galleries, analytics, social media integration, and other advanced features.

Pure Data is a popular dataflow programming environment for creative applications in audio, visuals and interaction. As an open source visual programming language, it is accessible to beginners, but it also offers a wide array of tools for experienced digital artists.

This course provides an introduction to the core programming skills required to design and build audio applications in Pure Data. Using synthesis, sampling, and signal processing techniques, users will learn to create unique and original devices and systems for music composition and performance. Throughout the course, we will review the fundamental objects available in Pure Data, and how to patch them together to implement standard audio techniques. We will also go over various best practices to help you organize your patches efficiently, and improve your workflow. Finally, we will put it all together in creative projects that will help you integrate what we have learned in your own art making. This introductory course will reveal that Pure Data is an ideal programming environment for creative purposes thanks to its built-in data processing and user interface tools.

This course provides hands-on experience in producing, mixing, and sound design with a digital audio workstation. Students will learn the fundamentals (physics) of sound and digital audio, proper gain staging, where and how distortion enters recordings and mixes, how to set levels and panning, effective sub group mixing, and an introduction to signal processing such as equalization, compression, delay, and reverb. In addition to core audio and mixing concepts, students will learn various production techniques, such as sequencing, arranging, automation, using virtual instruments (e.g. synths, samplers, and drum machine plugins), working with MIDI, plugin formats such as VST/Audio-Units, and mapping digital USB controllers for the studio and live performance.

The material covered in this course will range from the foundations of producing music and sound design, to more advanced topics such as Ableton "racks" (Audio Effect Racks, MIDI Effect Racks, Instrument Racks, and Drum Racks), multi-band effects processing, advanced modulation, warping, time-stretching, and mangling audio, as well as taking advantage of Live's audio analysis tools for extracting grooves, melody, harmony, and drums from recorded sound.

This dynamic course focuses on the history of modern and postmodern art from the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on major works found in the collection of the renowned Art Institute of Chicago.  Painting, sculpture, photography, and other media, placed within a larger socio-political context, will reveal how aesthetic expression proves a compelling barometer of the modern human experience. 

From the advent of European democracy and the parallel birth of the avant-garde artist, whose singular vision boldly shattered prevailing styles and norms, to the radical rise of abstract painting and the even more provocative introduction of everyday objects into works of art, this course will unfold modernism’s defiant embrace of the new. This course will engage the major issues of twentieth-century aesthetic practice, from Freud’s description of the unconscious and the play of dreams as fertile source material for the artist, to the explosive rise of pop art and the dizzying information age that has profoundly shaped contemporary practice. To closely study modern and postmodern art is to learn how to look at the world, to take notice of form, color, and image, and to respond to the richness of visual and material culture that is all around us. 

This course will not only provide a canonical repertoire of great works of historic art, as well as the context for understanding them, but through the unfolding of such a narrative, these lectures will allow new ways of observing one’s own contemporary world and reimagining its value.

Have you ever wanted to build a new musical instrument that responded to your gestures by making sound? Or create live visuals to accompany a dancer? Or create an interactive art installation that reacts to the movements or actions of an audience? If so, take this course!

In this course, students will learn fundamental machine learning techniques that can be used to make sense of human gesture, musical audio, and other real-time data. The focus will be on learning about algorithms, software tools, and best practices that can be immediately employed in creating new real-time systems in the arts.

Specific topics of discussion include:

• What is machine learning?

• Common types of machine learning for making sense of human actions and sensor data, with a focus on classification, regression, and segmentation

• The “machine learning pipeline”: understanding how signals, features, algorithms, and models fit together, and how to select and configure each part of this pipeline to get good analysis results

• Off-the-shelf tools for machine learning (e.g., Wekinator, Weka, GestureFollower)

• Feature extraction and analysis techniques that are well-suited for music, dance, gaming, and visual art, especially for human motion analysis and audio analysis

• How to connect your machine learning tools to common digital arts tools such as Max/MSP, PD, ChucK, Processing, Unity 3D, SuperCollider, OpenFrameworks

• Introduction to cheap & easy sensing technologies that can be used as inputs to machine learning systems (e.g., Kinect, computer vision, hardware sensors, gaming controllers)

Can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? Can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This class focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems. We explore topics ranging from basic mathematics and physics concepts to more advanced simulations of complex systems. Subjects covered include physics simulation, trigonometry, fractals, cellular automata, self-organization, and genetic algorithms. Examples are demonstrated using the p5.js environment with a focus on object oriented programming.

Video featuring original artwork in P5.js by:
Particle Equalizer #1 by Sehyun Kim
Look at me! by Muqing Niu
Dancing Spring by Yue Hu
FireWork by Yue Hu
Nature Of Code final at ITP by Joe_Mango
Nature of Code - midterm by Marcela Nowak
Sound And Motion Coding by Marcela Nowak

This course proposes an introduction and overview of the history and practice of generative arts and computational creativity with an emphasis on the formal paradigms and algorithms used for generation.

On the technical side, we will study core techniques from mathematics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life that are used by artists, designers and musicians across the creative industry. We will start with processes involving chance operations, chaos theory and fractals and move on to see how stochastic processes, and rule-based approaches can be used to explore creative spaces. We will study agents and multi-agent systems and delve into cellular automata, and virtual ecosystems to explore their potential to create novel and valuable artifacts and aesthetic experiences.

The presentation is illustrated by numerous examples from past and current productions across creative practices such as visual art, new media, music, poetry, literature, performing arts, design, architecture, games, robot-art, bio-art and net-art. Students get to practice these algorithms first hand and develop new generative pieces through assignments and projects in MAX. Finally, the course addresses relevant philosophical, and societal debates associated with the automation of creative tasks.

Music for this course was composed with the StyleMachineLite Max for Live engine of Metacreative Inc.
Artistic direction: Philippe Pasquier, Programmation: Arne Eigenfeldt, Sound Production: Philippe Bertrand

This course introduces students to twenty-four of the greatest mo(nu)ments in the history of Western art, and the forces that shaped the larger history of Western culture. Two dozen key monuments in different media, including visual arts, music and literature, will provide the focus for an evolving and ever more widely ranging discourse concerning the ways in which we define art. We will examine the way art has been (and can be) interpreted and re-interpreted; the infinitely complex relationships between art and the artist and the viewer; and the time and place in which it is made and the time and place in which it is subsequently seen, assessed, and interpreted.

The course begins with an examination of the fifth century BC Parthenon (1) on the Acropolis at Athens, the greatest example of Greek classical architecture and sculpture, followed by a discussion of the Hellenistic sculpture, Laokoön (2), a discussion that expands the notion of classicism and entails thoughtful consideration of the rapport between art and human suffering.

The Roman Pantheon (3), Emperor Hadrian’s temple to the planetary deities, by many scholars identified as the most perfect building in the world, will be the focus of the second session, leading to an examination of the sixth-century AD mosaics at San Vitale in Ravenna (4).

The Early Middle Ages in Europe will focus on the Lindisfarne Gospels (5), while the Sainte Chapelle (6) in Paris will be the conduit for a conversation on the Medieval ecclesiastical interior.

The Renaissance will pit Leonardo’s Last Supper (7) against Titian’s Rape of Europa (8) and Michelangelo’s David (9); Palladio’s Villa Rotonda (10), Caravaggio’s Beheading of Holofernes (11), and Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel (12) will extend that discussion into the Baroque period.

Northern art will be discussed in a session that moves from Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (13) to the etchings of Albrecht Durer (14) and the Bathsheba of Rembrandt (15). The complex of absolutist complexes that is the palace of Versailles (16) will be viewed from the perspective of Goya, as introduced by his Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta (17).

Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (17) will be viewed against the backdrop of the ancient regime. Romantic and Realist alternatives to Neoclassicism will be found in the “trialogue” between Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (18), Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (19) and Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (20). Monet’s Impression: Sunrise of 1872 (21) is the opening of a session which ends with a comparison of the Eiffel Tower (22) and the Ferris Wheel in Chicago (23).

The last session will consider a work by Jackson Pollock (24) as representative of the Modern notion of the end of the hegemony of traditional representation.

The piano remains one of the great achievements of musical instrument design and has long served as a primary creative tool for musicians worldwide. In this course, we will look at how the piano’s design touches on a range of diverse topics, like: where musical scales come from and how the piano’s design impacts creativity; the expressive relationship between various keyboard instrument designs; the extraordinary range of color that emerges when we listen closely to how various intervals can be tuned, and in turn the choices we need to make when tuning a keyboard instrument. We will also consider how the piano can be reinvented, both acoustically and digitally. This will include study of the prepared piano, the autonomous piano, and the digital piano, as well as Trueman’s own prepared digital piano, which itself raises a host of questions regarding rhythm, meter and groove, music perception, adaptive digital systems, and the creative process.

This is not a history course, but it is course that uses the piano to bring together a range of subjects that are often ignored or under developed in traditional music curricula. Nor is it a composition course, but students will be asked to create in a variety of ways, and it should be of use to both experienced and aspiring composers, not to mention pianists. We will engage with a range of music, going back to Frescobaldi, Scarlatti, J.S. Bach and his son C.P.E. Bach, through Schubert, all the way to more recent composers like Conlon Nancarrow, György Ligeti, and John Cage. And finally this is in part an “artist practicum” course, focusing on the creative process and how composers today might invent, and reinvent, instruments to create new work; some of Trueman’s own work, including the Nostalgic Synchronic Etudes for prepared digital piano, will come in to play.