Online courses directory (88)

The course, lecture, and examples build on each other to teach the fundamentals of programming in general (logic, loops, functions, objects, classes) and also deals with advanced topics including multi-threading, events and signals. Throughout the course, students create meaningful and rewarding expressive digital “instruments” that make sound and music in direct response to program logic. The ChucK language provides precise high-level control over time, audio computation, and user interface elements (track pad, joysticks, etc.). ChucK is used (unknowingly in most cases, via SMule Apps) by millions of users throughout the world, and is the backbone of dozens of academic programs and laptop orchestras. Learning to program using ChucK, through the musical examples provided in this course, will prepare students to program in C++, Java, and other languages. There will be special guest lectures from creators of the ChucK language, Dr. Ge Wang (Stanford University) and Dr. Perry R. Cook (Princeton University).

Explore how leading audio, music, and video technology companies bring products from idea to market, and discover your career options in the industry! In five 30- to 60-minute sessions, you’ll gain insight into daily life at companies such as Adobe, Universal Audio, iZotope, and more. Learn from professionals who design, engineer, manage, and market leading creative technologies. Examine best practices and responsibilities of various industry roles. Hiring managers will share secrets in navigating the hiring process. And, get your questions answered by our mentor network of creative tech experts and entrepreneurs, who will be online to offer advice in AMA’s and one-on-one office hours.

Continue learning about the creative technology industry in our companion course, Inside the Music and Video Technology Industry.

This 4-session survey course covers the main designers in Parisian Fashion from the 1950s to the 1990s, focusing closely on one iconic creative individual for each decade. Their work is discussed in light of the cultural and political context of the time, which students learn about through video lectures, assigned readings and discussions. In addition to learning about specific designers and key sartorial techniques and trends, students learn about the main phenomena in the fashion business for each decade.

The first session will be devoted to the 1950s and the beginning of post-war changes in dress codes for both men and women. Pierre Cardin is the featured designer. The second session will be devoted to the 1960s and the culture of youth that it brought about. Yves Saint Laurent is the featured designer. The third session is devoted to the 1970s, with Kenzo and Sonia Rykiel in the limelight. The fourth session covers the 1980s culture of power, money, and excess with Jean Charles de Castelbajac, Rei Kawakubo and Yoshi Yamamoto as the highlighted designers.

This Art History course investigates the role of the French avant-garde in developing and showcasing new modern forms and approaches to art and visual culture in the 19th century. The material addresses the most critical issues of modernity from Realism through Post-Impressionism. We will cover the stylistic changes that challenged academic art, the new subjects that confounded modern audiences, and the new roles and authority of the modern artist. To do this, we will focus on the European world through a series of video podcasts and online readings over five weeks. By the end of the course, you will understand the issues of modernity and the way that art and art-making addressed these issues as well as recognize the profound impact that 19th century Europe had in shaping our contemporary ideas of being “modern.”

Today's vast amount of streaming and video conferencing on the Internet lacks one aspect of musical fun and that's what this course is about: high-quality, near-synchronous musical collaboration. Under the right conditions, the Internet can be used for ultra-low-latency, uncompressed sound transmission. The course teaches open-source (free) techniques for setting up city-to-city studio-to-studio audio links. Distributed rehearsing, production and split ensemble concerts are the goal. Setting up such links and debugging them requires knowledge of network protocols, network audio issues and some ear training.

This course will take the student through the basics of visual development: from visual storytelling to character design; from creatures to environment design. Beginning with simple visual elements, the student will learn how to create images that tell a story visually, as well as support a production in animation, live action, and video games.

A course examining the art of moving while standing still, and traveling far without moving. This will be approached through a study of form and variation techniques used in music. Students will be asked to make more from less while maintaining musical interest in their compositions.

Compositional techniques and styles studied include minimalism, ambient, alternative, musique concréte, popular, independent, experimental and sample based music. Assessment will consist of short composition assignments (1-2 min) rooted in class discussion and readings. These will be turned in as audio files. A single composition of 5-10 minutes will act as the final project.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

· Compose an engaging piece of music using a minimum amount of musical material.

· Critically engage with a piece of music through aural analysis.

· Analyze or break down music compositions to determine structural form and construction.

· Adapt compositional principles to their own music.

· Discover new approaches to music composition.

This class provides a theoretical and practical understanding of the growing field of contemporary museum education. It includes an examination of the changes occurring in art and design educational paradigms within the museum world, the evolving nature of museums as institutions with educational missions, along with learning and interpretive theories unique to the museum context. The class provides an extensive hands-on component devoted to the special methods, practices, and skills associated with teaching with artworks, and in designing educational material, projects, programs and innovative learning experiences within the art and design museum settings. The course also explores critical issues facing the field through theory, practice, and the analysis of case studies, including audience diversity, collaboration with schools and communities, the rethinking of museum missions and practices, and the potential for innovation and avant-garde practice within the field.

This course is an introduction to writing code within the context of the visual arts. It asks two primary questions:

What is the potential of software within the visual arts?
As a designer or artist, why would I want (or need) to write software?

Software influences all aspects of contemporary visual culture. Many established artists have integrated software into their process. Prominent architects and designers not only use software, they commission custom software to help them realize their unique ideas. The creators of every innovative video game and Hollywood animated film write custom software to enhance their work.

As a comprehensive first introduction to the potential of software development within a broad range of the arts, this course aspires to teach you to engage the computer more directly with code. Programming opens the possibility to create not only tools, but systems, environments, and new modes of expression. It is here that the computer ceases to be a tool and becomes a medium.

This course introduces the basics of Digital Signal Processing and computational acoustics, motivated by the vibrational physics of real-world objects and systems. We will build from a simple mass-spring and pendulum to demonstrate oscillation, learn how to simulate those systems in the computer, and also prove that these simple oscillations behave as a sine wave. From that we move to plucked strings and struck bars, showing both solutions as combined traveling waves and combined sine wave harmonics. We continue to build and simulate more complex systems containing many vibrating objects and resonators (stringed instruments, drum, plate), and also learn how to simulate echos and room reverberation. Through this process, we will learn about digital signals, filters, oscillators, harmonics, spectral analysis, linear and non-linear systems, particle models, and all the necessary building blocks to synthesize essentially any sound. The free open-source software provided will make it possible for anyone to use physical models in their art-making, game or movie sound, or any other application.

This course provides an introductory overview of audio synthesis and visual programming using Native Instruments' Reaktor Software.  Students will receive an in-depth look into various audio synthesis methods, including: additive, subtractive, sampling, wavetable, physical modeling, and granular synthesis, as well as the various types of modulation synthesis. Students will also learn about the history of the synthesizer and electronic music, and will take a look at many of the current sound design trends in electronic music.  

Additional topics include:
• Sound + waveform characteristics (Timbre)
• Modulation/filters/envelopes
• MIDI/OSC
• Analog + digital signals
• Signal flow
• DAWs/sequencing
• Sound design
• Audio effects
• Production techniques
• Audio warping/FFT 

Creative Programming for Audiovisual Art aims to enhance student skills and experience in the development of software for the creation and manipulation of sounds and images, both in real and non-real time. The course explores the intersection and similarities between sound and image signal processing through the exploration of combined audiovisual approaches. As such it is suitable for those with a strong interest in creative technologies from either an engineering or creative arts background.

This course extends the principles of creative engineering for use in arts, games, and more general interaction scenarios so that students can develop their own projects through the use of computational approaches to audiovisual processing. The lessons will be taught using Javascript. It is recommended that students have some experience with using Processing and some background in digital audio and/or digital image manipulation before taking this course.

Materials on how to use Javascript will be made available, and we will be using bespoke tools and libraries to make this a lot easier. At first we will use ready made code to apply creative techniques. Following this, you’ll be expected to develop your own code based on what you’ve learned. Throughout this process, you should pick up some great skills.

We will spend the first few sessions exploring Digital Audio Signal Processing. This will cover synthesis, sequencing, filtering, sample loading and playback, panning and rudimentary analysis. Following this we’ll be looking at audiovisual interaction using video and 3D graphics.

This course provides a broad overview and substantial introduction to the theories and practices of current object design. Illustrated using recent work from established and emerging designers, this course provides a journey through the "meaning-making" processes that lead to iconic products, and a glimpse into the world of the designers who create them. During the second half of the Twentieth Century, the clearly defined profession of industrial design broadened and fragmented into a defuse array of specialized practices. Rather than confining their activity to shaping objects for everyday use, object designers have expanded their practice by borrowing from fields such as sociology, anthropology, art, film, and management consultancy, thereby uncovering new ways in which design can affect our lives.

Beginning with a tour through design’s pluralism, this course delves into the power relations and semiotic structures which lie behind object making. It analyzes the process of design as it unfolds in the designer’s mind, on paper, through model making, and via other generative “thinking tools”. Examining the motivation of designers today, it reveals radical, avant-garde positions, as well as progressive, ethical, and sustainable practices that question the profession’s quiet complicity in unchecked mass consumption. This course concludes by examining the working contexts of today’s object designers, discussing the often "slippery" nature of client relationships, as well as the joys and perils of independent practice. Making Meaning: Designing Objects offers insight into the way today’s object designers operate, the theories that guide their decision-making, and the tools and processes they use to get results.

This course is an introduction to using the Web for artistic creation. It is a "literacy" course designed to introduce you to the various core components that make the web such a powerful platform for art – art that is not only visual, but sonic, physical, interactive, and social. It will give you the basics (in terms of knowledge and code templates) to make things that run in browsers using:

• Animation with graphics and sound,

• Interaction with graphics and sound,

Just as you don't need to be a mechanic to drive a car, you do not need to wait until you are an expert programmer before creating work for the web.

There is a vast array of tools for making things for the web. Making things for the web is a process of constant learning and discovery – not one of knowing everything first and then making. It is also a process of ripping and mashing rather than writing everything from scratch. Getting comfortable with this process is the first step, and is the approach we take in this introductory course.

By the end of this course, you will be making things with the real-world core components that give the web its potential for art, but you will have only just begun. More importantly, you will understand what you have to learn more about to accomplish your artistic objectives, be able to recognize things and be able to evaluate their value to you, and have a command of the terminology you need to search for and discuss your needs and interests with the huge community of people on the net with experience (and code chunks) to share.

Why JavaScript and the Web?

There are some excellent special-purpose coding platforms for artists out there such as Processing for interactive graphics, Chuck or supercollider for synthesis, graphical languages such as Max/MSP or PD for interactive sound and graphics. These platforms have extensive communities of people to share experience and code with. However, these special-purpose platforms are not standard web building and design tools.

What they offer is a direct path to achieving a specific artistic objective, but it is at the expense of a more general applicability of language, tools, and skills that would allow you to interact with people in the web-based creative industries. They do a great job at "hiding" things you may not want to worry about as an artist, but dealing with a bit of the scaffolding is necessary if the web is the space you have chosen to embark on for developing your work.

This course will take you through the basics you need to develop artistic content for the web using standard web tools – JavaScript, html, and several fundamental libraries. It will point you to exactly what concerns an artist most – making creative content. It will guide you and teach you what you can ignore for now in order to focus on artistic content, but will not prevent you from integrating with the vast world of the web and learning and using some of the scaffolding if and when you should need it later.

Our basic approach to achieving this goal is to "throw you in to the deep end" with a set of code templates for meeting artistic goals – interactive graphical mobile applications using physical sensors, for example, and explaining simple things you can do immediately to explore and implement your own ideas.

The advantages to JavaScript:

• It is the language embedded in all browsers today.

• It is general purpose, and makes no assumptions that limit your artistic objectives.

• You can deploy all your work on the web for others to experience.

• You only need to learn one language for writing both client and server code.

• A *lot* of other people use it that you can share and communicate with.

• It is a marketable skill.

Thus, we are not restricting you to special-purpose tools that don't generalize well to the web – but that doesn't mean you will have to write a bunch of code not related to your artistic vision. The "template" technique used in this course is a "middle way" that gets you up and going fast, but provides a path to future growth and connection to the real world.

You will learn to recognize patterns of code that you need not know how to write. This will provide you with a basic understanding of how things work in the real world (let's call it literacy). This will help you find, recognize, and use chunks of code that others share, and it will allow you to focus on code directly relevant to artistic content.

This will give you the foundations you need to go on learning on your own by exploring the unstructured wealth of material available out there on the web to pillage and modify for your own work. That is how real web programmers work all the time, anyway!

Animated GIFs are kind of like the flipbooks of the digital age. Quick and easy to produce and distribute, but with almost endless creative possibilities, the creation of animated GIFs is a great way to begin to explore both digital and traditional time based media. The popularity of animated GIFs in social media and advertising, the rise of short form video sharing sites like Vine and Instagram, and the ability to easily create short animations and videos with mobile devices make this kind of "micro cinema" an important part of our contemporary media landscape. Course will include introduction to creating GIFs with Adobe Photoshop.

Learn how the music and video technology industry operates behind the scenes, and get career advice directly from industry professionals. In six 50-minute video sessions, meet over fifteen mentors who share their experiences of working at Pandora, LANDR, Sonos, Native Instruments, and more. Access to exclusive product case studies will allow you to develop the tools for a smoother transition into this industry, giving you a look into the day-to-day life of various roles - from marketing to engineering. Plus, engage renowned music tech industry experts and entrepreneurs in online AMA’s and one-on-one office hours.

Continue learning with Real Industry mentors through the online course Careers in Media Technology.

Where did graphic design come from, and where will it go next? This fast-paced introduction to graphic design history will change your understanding of everything from fonts and letterforms to posters and brands. Discover how printers revolutionized society when they created open access to information. Explore the visual systems that inform graphic design practice—from handwritten alphabets to online publications. Learn how avant-garde artists, architects, poets, and painters shook the world by reinventing mass media. Pursue the dream of a unified civilization held together by neutral typefaces, international pictograms, and global brands—and see how subcultures rebelled against cultural uniformity by forging their own visual identities. Thinking about history will open your eyes to new ideas and diverse practices. The course is taught by Brockett Horne and Ellen Lupton, renowned authors and leading faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In a series of dynamic conversations, they will introduce you to fascinating people and processes that changed the way we communicate. Test your knowledge with short quizzes, and stretch your own design practice by responding to inspiring creative prompts.

Course image A. M. Cassandre. The uncompromising one, the strongest, 1925. Lithograph.
Collection of Merrill C. Berman

In this course, we’ll explore what it means to work collaboratively in building a more sustainable and equitable society for all people. Students in this course will learn to acknowledge their context, privileges and disadvantages, and the different ways they have of knowing the world. In this course, learning and teaching will be generative, fluid processes. Much of the hard work of this course will be outside the classroom: reading, thinking, organizing and providing situated context for our ideas so our class colleagues can come to a fuller, richer understanding of our own shared and individual experiences. The students and instructor will come together to discover and explore the ideas shaped by the readings, and build emergent systems that provide deeper understanding of our own boundaries and possibilities.

This course explores the primary entertainment vehicles that students are exposed to on a daily basis through a series of interlinking concepts such as the digital audio workstation, a Kraftwerk 3D concert, interactive toys, robotics in art, 3D projection mapping, Pokémon Go! and much more.

This examination is supported by a critical evaluation of the various kinds of technologies that have emerged along the continuum of entertainment technology.

How have these technologies shaped and even created new art forms? How have these transformations informed styles and genres across theater, recording music, feature films, integrated media events, game play from consoles to hand-helds and the explosion of commercially accessible virtual and augmented realities?

Information will be synthesized through an understanding that the common thread has been the ever-expanding role of computing technologies in all forms of commercial and popular art.

This course is an introduction to the methods of cinematic storytelling, with an emphasis on visual grammar and techniques. Students will learn story structure, and how to develop written or spoken ideas into a clear dramatic narrative arc, and how to edit and juxtapose images to create a clear and emotionally engaging result. They will also learn how collaboration and the ability to show work in progress, giving and getting notes from peers, make everybody’s work better.