Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed
The Computational Approaches to Music and Audio I will introduce students to programming for the development of applications of generative music and audio, ranging from standalone musical compositions to fun and engaging musical games or intelligent musical instruments. These applications will be developed mostly in Max, a widely used and very popular graphical programming environment for electronic music and interactive media. By the end of this course students will have become familiar with current approaches to audio and music programming namely in the Max programming environment, plug-in creation for Ableton Live, as well as have acquired a strong foundation in the field that will prepare them for the second course in the sequence.
Music (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates:
This course explores how technology and machines have influenced human life across the ages. It further explores how technology has influenced the fields of arts and design and investigates this inspirational source for new technological developments. Lecture and discussion will be the breeding ground for concept development of new machines: Every student will realize a prototype of a machine executing a certain task. This hands-on project will be complemented by case studies, reading assignments, workshops, excursions, and one-on-one meetings with the professor. The course builds knowledge about futuristic developments and their use and influence from past to present, including questions concerning ethics and values. Students will leave the course with a completed project to be displayed in an exhibition and a personal philosophy of Arts, Design, and Technology.
Core: Arts, Design and Technology (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Wed
It would be a misnomer to assume that technology is something we “use.” Rather, the human appears as embedded in a matrix of the socio-techno-material. In this sense, there is something quite non-technical about technology which has an intrinsically social nature and can take the form of bodily and socializing techniques, the canalization of creative powers, becomings of all sorts, and of course the mechanical and material manipulation of ourselves and our life-worlds. We must thus speak of a biological and technical habitus of dependency and over-coming, one constituted by everything from creating art, to language, to ideological persuasion, to human enhancement and post-humanism, and various forms of convergence. What is the relationship between these various techniques and technologies and their respective effects (ethical, cultural, aesthetic) on the category of the human? Social transformation and technology cannot be theorized in isolation. The technological, mediological, and digital have to be unearthed as constitutive of our shared “material culture” and milieu. Within such a milieu, which is both internal and external to actors and agents implicated within it, the “essence” of the human is not only potentially redefined, but indeed dissolved. In such a potential redefinition and dissolution, one finds a radically new ethical and political threshold that has yet to be adequately theorized. This course attempts to reveal this threshold through developing a critical heuristic which maps the topoi of the socio-eco-techno system. Drawing on mediology, ethics, and the French school of the anthropology of techniques, we explore such topoi in terms as both “deep” historical sediment and also futurology with a view to illuminating how our values are negotiated and transformed in our rapport with the technological.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks