MU 2801: Making Music with Machines

This course will explore automatic mechanical (electro)acoustic instruments, the people that design and build them and the music that they make. The subject is inherently interdisciplinary, so activities will engage with historical, musical, and technical matters. The history of automatic mechanical instruments reaches back centuries: we will study past designs so that we can better contextualize modern efforts, which have progressed alongside increasing computational power and machine sensing abilities. We will consider the music that has been composed using such instruments including the works of Anthiel, Nancarrow, Ligeti, Gann, and Metheny. In doing so, we will develop analytical tools required to understand such music and will illuminate relationships between electromechanical capabilities and musical ideas. The technical components of this course will introduce students to principles involved in instrument design, actuators, electronic circuits, microcontrollers, and musical programming environments. We will do all of this with our mind open to the question of how we can design new machines to make new kinds of music. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.