Online courses directory (88)

This course presents five sessions in which the student continues to learn piano technique and repertoire through use of the C and G Major scales and primary chords. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training, and a video assessment of the student playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for two concert reviews, which can be completed at any time during the course. After the completing the five sessions, the student will complete a final exam by performing a memorized piece of music and a piece learned by ear (Instructor’s Choice) for an audience. The memorized piece will be the student’s choice from Sessions 4 or 5 in this course, and must be digitally recorded and uploaded as an additional video assessment. This course presents five sessions in which the student continues to learn piano technique and repertoire through use of primary chords and scales in C and G Major. Each session contains a video lecture presented by the Instructor, piano practice assignments, and graded assignments that include a quiz about music terms, theory and/or ear training, and a video submitted by the student of playing selected piano technique and repertoire. The course also includes a graded assignment for a concert review and report, which can be completed at any time during the course. After the competing the five sessions, the student will complete a final exam by performing a memorized piece of music for an audience. This piece will be the student’s choice from Sessions 4 or 5 in this course and must be digitally recorded and uploaded to YouTube with a link provided in the course website.

In this course, we will explore adding features and functionality to our Arduino. We will expand upon the foundations taught in Foundations in Arduino Programming and show you how to make sounds, display information, and interface special addressable RGB LEDs.

After you've mastered the basics of input and output on the Arduino, the next step is learning how to get the Arduino to make sounds and play notes. We will then expand this project to show you how to play your favorite ringtones or small music files right on your Arduino! Finally, the course will conclude with an activity around interfacing and programming for a strip of WS2812 Addressable LEDs.

This course is offered in collaboration with SparkFun Electronics.

This third course examines the explosion of the mass media and its expression in Pop art as well as the rise of the simpler, but equally powerful movement called Minimalism. Conceptual art, performance/body art, Land Art, takes us into the countercultural 70s, and then finally the dizzying glut of the information age and Postmodernism.

If the negative comes alive in the darkroom, then a film comes alive in the edit bay. There is a lot an editor must know to keep organized and hold onto the director’s creative vision. In addition, a videographer with knowledge of how the footage will be cut and assembled will be a much stronger shooter. In this class you will jump into the art of editing your work, exploring the tools, workflows and practice of editing.

Professional video productions involve a lot of planning. There is equipment to prepare and staff to schedule, and more importantly there is a creative vision which needs to be understood as your crew works together to make it all happen in camera. Pre-Production will get you ready for your first shoot – covering everything from storyboarding to managing the crew, location and lighting.

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.

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.

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.

Selling and Protecting Typefaces addresses the many concerns of developing and marketing typefaces for the professional environment. The course also discusses the different roles of a type foundry, an aggregator, and the individual designer who wishes to license and sell a typeface.

The course covers all the issues involved in selecting and licensing typefaces for commercial use in all sectors of the design industry: e-commerce, direct sales, social media, traditional advertising, intellectual property, licensing models, and pricing. It includes start to finish instruction in creating design briefs for custom-type projects for clients of all sizes and budget levels. Fee scales for custom type design will be discussed in depth. Participants will be familiarized with professional industry standards for high-quality digital typefaces in contemporary markets, including language support, font file formats and technical concerns.

This four-session course explores a practical approach to composing and producing music with Native Instruments Kontakt. We will cover the most important technical and aesthetic aspects of creating music with the industry-standard Kontakt sampler. Weekly assignments will give you practical experience in putting these technical skills in a musical context. Topics include Kontakt library, signal flow, layering, working with drums, building custom sampled instruments, file management, modulation, audio FX, automation, and DAW integration. At the end of this course, you will have created four original compositions with Kontakt, in addition to numerous custom sampled instruments.

As the name suggests, Sound Essentials covers an entirely new dimension that can make or break your video work. Sound carries emotion, and can have an enormous impact on your story. The tools, the terminology and the language of sound production often feel foreign to photographers, but this class will provide a thorough foundation which will get you recording professional sound in no time.

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 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 

This second course covers the rebels and revolutionaries of the Dada and Surrealist movements including Duchamp, Dali, Magritte, and others. And then we jump across the pond to look at the American succession of the New York School with de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Krasner, and many more.

The systems we built in Course 2 become real as they morph into tax reporting obligations. This course provides an overview of U.S. income, consumption, and employment taxes, and connects the U.S. tax system requirements to tools we use in a professional creative practice.

In this course, students are introduced to the practice and principles of hot glass; hand blowing, mold blowing, hot casting, cold working and sculpting. Territories of production, conceptual and discipline inquiry and critique will be introduced and used.

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.

Over the past fifteen years, many of the music industry’s greatest artists have made public valuable information about how they created their iconic sounds. Through the release of memoirs and interviews, their techniques—once considered closely-guarded industry secrets and the keys to their success—are now available to anyone who wants to use them. The information, however, is scattered amongst hundreds of sources. This class strives to gather up that information and assemble it in a way that allows the student to witness the historical evolution of the industry and, even more importantly, make immediate use of each technique as it is presented.

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.”

The role of the music technologist has changed throughout history, though one trait has stayed consistent: the necessity for the individual to operate across multiple mediums and disciplines. This project-based course provides an opportunity to synthesize the key concepts and skills learned in the Foundations of Music Technology Program, and enables students to establish meaningful connections between the contents of each course. The course will have students acquire real-world artistic experience, through the critical examination of historical works, and the completion of a final project, which demonstrates their ability show how they themselves have become The Modern Music Technologist.