Make some music!
The Digital Music Lab in the Music & Arts Library (701 Dodge) offers an extensive collection of software and hardware to enable your inner Beethoven, rock star, or musical mad scientist. The Lab is equipped with 5 Mac Pro workstations, 2 Yamaha Arius YDP181 digital pianos (with weighted keyboard action and MIDI connectivity), and a large-format scanner to accommodate the scanning of larger music scores. The software available in the Digital Music Lab includes:
- Finale, Sibelius (music notation)
- Photoscore (music scanning/OCR utility)
- Audacity (simple freeware audio recording and editor)
- Amadeus Pro (more fully-featured audio editor)
- Logic Pro (multi-channel digital audio workstation environment)
- Ableton Live (audio & MIDI compositional and performance environment)
- Max/MSP/Jitter (audio, MIDI, and video extensible programming tool)
- Max4Live (allows inter-application routing between Max/MSP and Live)
- OpenMusic (composition environment from IRCAM)
- AudioSculpt (spectral editing and effects from IRCAM)
- SPEAR (audio partial analysis, editing, and resynthesis)
- MacGamut (ear training)
- Soundflower, SoundSource, MIDI Monitor (audio + MIDI utilities)
So, what can you do with all of this? Some projects to date have included:
- preparation of professional-quality music scores and parts
- scanning music for editing, transposing, and preparation for performance
- experimenting with orchestration & arrangements
- composing and recording from the digital piano
- multi-track editing of audio for CD release
- audio recording, editing, and cleanup of LP content
- other possibilities might include scoring audio to picture, writing a program to use video to create music, building your own virtual synthesizer, and more.
Want to learn more? Info sessions on the Digital Music Lab are offered periodically; the next session is on Friday, Oct. 21, from 1-2:30 pm, in the Music & Arts Library. Registration is required, and is available at this link (http://bit.ly/MusicLabDemos).
Can’t make the upcoming info session, but would like to be notified of future sessions? Just use the same registration link as above, and indicate that you’re interested in future sessions. We’ll get back to you as future sessions are scheduled.
Comments or questions? Contact us at musiclibrary@columbia.edu. We hope to see you getting creative in the Digital Music Lab!