Description of Completed Project

Our project encompassed the relationship between music and computers. The roots of computer music can be traced back to the origins of electronic music. The home page of our project deals with the brief history of computer music and explains some of the electronic technology in instruments like the Telharmonium (1897) that used additive synthesis, which enabled it to produce electrical signals. Following the history of computer music comes the MIDI section, which takes an in-depth look into the history and basics of MIDI.

The USB and FireWire tabs on the website take on a different approach as with these two the storage and transference of music is dealt with. The basics of USB and FireWire are discussed as well as their differences and the companies that back them up. Everything from the bit rate speed, to overdubs, to analog-todigital converter (ADC) and digital-to-analog converter (DAC), are mentioned so that the reader is provided with all the basic facts to make the right decision when choosing between the two.

The last two sections comprise of the software and instruments used in the creation of computer music and the technology we have arrived with. As electronic music has been thriving for almost a century, rapid advancements in this field have taken place. The different softwares that are mentioned and described in detail are Propellerhead's Reason, DigiDesign's Protool, Native Instrument's Kontakt, Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology and Adobe Audition. In the last section ("Instruments"), the M-Audio Keystation 61es and the Korg Kaoss Pad 3 are mentioned combined with a practical test to see whether the class is aware of the subtle difference between a real instrument and Reason's sampled guitar.

In addition to the theory that is mentioned on the website, we demonstrated some practical examples to the class which involved the use of the Korg Kaos Pad 3 (MIDI) connected to a Nintendo DS. Also, an excerpt from an electronic piece was used to portray the usage of MIDI instruments in making computer music.

Fulfilment of Project Proposal

Our main goal in this project was to build an informative HTML website that would deal with Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and how digital data is transmitted both via MIDI, USB and FireWire. Our project fulfilled the proposal thusly:

• Usage of paragraph tags and italic tags to highlight specific terms throughout the website; in addition, bold tags were used for headers.
• Usage of audio samples to demonstrate the difference between MIDI sound and actual instruments.
• Buttons with mouse over actios using JavaScript that link to each page of the site.
• Explanation of software such as Reason, Kontakt, ProTools, Adobe Audition, instruments such as the Keystation 61es and the Kaoss Pad 3, and a comparison between a sampled guitar triggered by MIDI versus a real guitar.
• History section of MIDI as well as the description of the Keystation 61es controller.
• Contribution of original pieces in MP3 format to showcase the capabilities of computer music (both the MIDI guitar and real guitar and my own music).

Summary of the concepts from class

We used JavaScript in order to manipulate a DOM object. For example, we used the document object to manipulate the images in the HTML site for the mouse rollover effect of the buttons.

We also used Cascading Style Sheet to add consistency in the look and feel of our site, such as our fonts (including how links would appear) throughout the site. For this, we created a .CSS file which contained the size of the font, the type of font and the colours of links and visited links. We called the .CSS file by putting "<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../main.css>" after the <title> tag and before <header> tag.

We used nested tables to centre our entire content and page according to the visitor's screen area by using 100% on both the height and width of the first table, then including the actual graphics and content in another table. We also created a border with seamless sides that duplicate themselves as the content (text) increases, and this was also done by putting "100%" in the height of the <img> tag.

Lastly, we learnt about creating and designing a graphic layout in Adobe ImageReady and creating layers in this software and in PhotoShop with various filters and effects.

Accomplished Tasks

• Contributed the music and practical explanations which were used in class
• Website design, HTML and JavaScript
• Explanation of history, MIDI, Software and Instruments sections
• Explanation of Universal Serial Bus (USB), FireWire sections and their differences
• Contribution to design of website appeal and interface
• Talked about the practical experiments involving various instruments while showcasing them to the class.

Sources

Sound on Sound: MIDI

How Stuff Works: Digital Data

Sound on Sound: FireWire

Sound on Sound: History of Roland

Midi.org

Digidesign.com

Propellerheads.se

M-audio.com

Korg Kaoss Pad 3