Daniel Warner

Recent and Upcoming Courses

• The Tuning of the World: Soundscape Studies / Soundscape Composition

  This course invites participants from diverse disciplines to investigate the interconnections of listeners and their sonic environments. A soundscape is an environment of sounds with emphasis on the way it is perceived, understood, and inhabited by an individual, a group, or by an entire society. The term may refer to actual environments, or to abstract constructions such as musical compositions and tape montages, particularly when considered as an artificial environment. In this course we will learn the basic tenets of soundscape studies, examine the concepts and issues associated with sound, its perception, and listening strategies. We will read and discuss important texts in acoustic ecology, acoustics, sound studies, and soundscape composition. Students will be given a wide range of areas for course projects such as conservation, ecology and environmental studies, cultural perspectives, creative writing, art-making, and sound composition.

• Computer Music I

  This is a composition course that will also survey the history, theory, and practice of electro-acoustic music. The course will introduce the musical, technical, and theoretical issues of electro-acoustic music, broadly construed to include the Classical avant-garde, Electronica, DJ culture, Re-mixes, Ambient, etc. Digital recording, editing, and mixing will be covered using the Audacity, Logic, or ProTools programs. Students will also work with sampling and looping techniques using Ableton Live. Other topics to be covered include basic acoustics and synthesis techniques. Students will be expected to complete three composition projects during the course of the semester. Formal knowledge of music is helpful, but not required.

• Field Study Semester

• Audio Culture: Theories and Practices in Music Now

  This course will explore a range of vanguard musical practices and various approaches to thinking theoretically and critically about them. We will traverse musical areas such as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrete, free improvisation, turntablism, and electronica, and examine these via historical and philosophical texts by theorists, composers and producers. Investigating different modes of listening to and talking about contemporary music, we will ask such questions as: What is the nature of music in relationship to silence and noise? What are the effects of recording and sampling on contemporary musical life? Can music have a political or critical function? Are the distinctions between "classical" and "popular," "high art" and "mass art" still appropriate in the contemporary setting?

• Computer Music 2

  This course will focus on a wide range of topics in sound synthesis and music composition using the MAX/MSP/JITTER program. Students will undertake projects in interactive MIDI composition, algorithmic composition, additive and subtractive synthesis, waveshaping, AM/FM synthesis, and sampling. Other topics to be covered include SYSEX programming, sound analysis, theories of timbre, and concepts of musical time.

• Field Study

• Contemporary Musical Practices

  This course will engage the important compositional practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will compose music using post-tonal pitch systems, new scalar and chordal constructions, and expanded formal and textural possibilities. We will focus on the creation of new, non-traditional hierarchies within musical systems with regard to intervals, notions of consonance and dissonance, asymmetrical meters, non-metrical rhythm, and tuning. Students will also be encouraged to develop new compositional strategies through the examination of existing practices such as polytonality, serialism, pitch-class composition, minimalism, and indeterminacy.