Welcome, This is Terry Ewell and I am going to be your tour guide to some online creative communities. I am very excited about this. These are developments that have just occurred in the last few years. Many of these are brand new and these are ways in which you can interact with others, you can share music and sounds and all sorts of things.
http://www.freesound.org/ is an archive of sounds that people have donated, that you may use freely in your projects in this course. I will be introducing you to some of the features here. One of the courses I teach, MUSC 116 Composition for non-majors, uses this site quite often.
You go to freesound and you will have to join or register in order to download the files. So let me login here. I have put in my username “tewell” and my password in the login. When you get to the login screen there is an area we are able to search. I am going to have to drag this over here so that you can see where the area is. Let’s just search for gunshots. You will find many very good things on this site. Let me drag this over here so that we are now back so that you can see it. OK.
Here we have my search for gunshots. This is searching tags and descriptions. So when you are searching for things…let’s search for alien…noises. Here we have all sorts of alien noises. I can press here and listen.
<alien scary noise>
Oh, yes, very scary! What about horses? Let’s see what we have here for horses, sound files for horses. Here is horse and nature. Here is a galloping horse. Let’s say I wanted a galloping horse.
<galloping horse>
There we go, a galloping horse. Anyhow, you will be able to find a tremendous number of sounds here. This was a brief overview of that. I think that you will find this very useful. Do go right ahead and join.
Next I want you to be aware of (although this is a class where we don’t read music), there is an online site with free printed music and scores. These are public domain scores and music. Some are also under Creative Commons that have been recently posted there, that are new. So if you are interested in some printed music, this “imslp.org” is a great source.
You may not also be aware that there is an online site where people interact, where they create their own avatars and go to islands, restaurants, clubs, and attend live concerts—even church services—all of that online. Registration is required for that. This is “Second Life.” I have had fun being on the site with an art class at Towson University. Towson University has its own island as well. That is another way in which you can interact with others.
MIDI is instructions for playing music, but it is not musical sounds themselves. First I want you to be aware of a very large site of classical music. This site has classical music that is public domain. I will pull that up. Here, for example, is the Bach Connection of the Classical Collection. We have all sorts of Bach’s Preludes and Inventions. These can be downloaded. These are all MIDI files.
Another collection we have is both classical and contemporary. This is found, it is called “midiworld.” Unfortunately this is all scrambled up because I am using such a small screen. There are even some mp3 files and ring tones and things like that. You can scroll down on the right hand side and find all sorts of things from pop rock to classic to rap, dance, etc. These are all really helpful.
I did download one file. I downloaded “Brandy.” I think it was called that.
<music: Looking_Glass_-_Brandy_Youre_a_Fine_Girl>
Let me turn that up a little bit.
<music: Looking_Glass_-_Brandy_Youre_a_Fine_Girl>
Windows Media Player has a MIDI player and thus it is able read the MIDI instructions and play the file.
Let me show you. This is the really neat thing. I brought this into Reaper and expanded the tracks. Look at this: “Brandy, You’re a fine woman.” I have eight or nine tracks. It is all separated in MIDI (tracks) so I don’t have to use the whole things. Let’s say that I just want to use the drums—these Roland drums here. So I could just save the one track in Reaper, I could then record it being played on my computer and then use it as a background. So this is a great way to remix and grab. I am really excited about that possibility. I think that you should be as well.
OK, let’s go back to our file here. That was an example of “You’re a Fine Girl, Brandy” from that site that I found.
One other great site I found for you is this “ccmixter.” This site offers some samples you can use. This is some text I found online from “danosongs.” This is for mashup and mix online. All this is for free at ccmixter.org. I downloaded this “Earth Sample Pack” which has some neat things in it. It is a zip file. I had to pull it down [from the site]. Here is an example of what I have in there: 8 bar guitars, 16 bar guitars, some trumpet and some drum loops. There are a whole bunch of other things in here: violins and winds and things. This can really be useful. You can grab one of those things. Let me go over here and solo my drum loop and let you hear what I have in my drum loop.
<music: cymbal crash followed by drum set>
So, pretty cool. So I have some mp3 files there that I can use in my sound track., Consider the ramifications of being able to download other people's work, remix it, take different parts of it and then put that forth as your own work. You can see that this is quite a complicated issue, difficult to enforce copyright.
So you need to grab something from one of these online communities for your A section, as you know. Use that and start mixing it.
Now here are some additional references. I found this on “danosongs.” “Creative Commons” has some different content. You really have to hunt and search there. There are a huge number of files. “Internet Archive Open Source Audio” has a variety of audio tracks you can download from there. “Creative Commons Search.”
The last thing I want to leave you with is this very interesting creative community. This is probably something you don’t have time for in this course, but it will give you (if you were involved in the future) something to be quite interested in. Let me pull it up here. It is called “Indaba music.” It is an online creative community. You get together and you open sessions, these recordings sessions, and collaborate with people. You have to register. Then you have these online sessions. You mix and record. You add songs there and you upload things. It is really an interesting concept: what they have set up there.
This is your overview then on these online creative communities. I hope that your creativity extends well beyond this course and your activities. I know for several of you it will.
Naturally I hope that you are gaining knowledge from this course. But the greatest compliment you can give me is by showing your creativity has been stimulated by the materials I have presented you. Bye.