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.\" Use groff -Kutf8 -mom -Tpdf 01-intro.mom > out.pdf
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\" Senior thesis for VCUarts major in Kinetic Imaging with a minor in Sound Design
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\" Please write a forward, RDJ!
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.mom
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.AUTHOR "Leonard Francis Coogan"
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.TITLE "Sound Hacking: Composing Braindance / IDM"
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.PRINTSTYLE TYPESET
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.papersize letter
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.DOCTYPE DEFAULT
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.START
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.HEADING 1 "Preface"
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.PP
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To me, I think of IDM not as a style, but an approach to electronic music that presents experimental sound design and compositional techniques in the context of techno. This book frames sound synthesis methods and alternative tunings in the context of IDM in order to make these concepts practical and applicable for intermediate electronic music composers
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.PP
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Access to music technology is universal for anyone with a computer, but education isn’t. To write this book, I conducted endless experiments in SuperCollider and studied computer music textbooks to discover what’s useful. Through experimentation, I found that certain tools suit certain purposes — but if one piece of intellectual advice is missing, the results can be boring or hideous.
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.PP
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This book aims to give intermediate electronic music producers advice on how to think more critically about their sound design choices. For true beginners without any music or technology background, this book might be too advanced — you might benefit more from starting with foundational music theory, especially if you struggle to create melodic or harmonic content. Although IDM compositions tend to be simple theory-wise, they're still strong compositions. You need a stable structural base to build the complex sound design.
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.PP
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If I end up working professionally in sound design — not just for electronic music, but for film, animation, or games — this book could eventually expand to explore how sound design functions across those mediums. In IDM, sound design is the foreground; it carries the structure and invites deep, focused listening. In film and animation, sound design supports another medium — it sets the mood, enhances the world, and reinforces narrative without drawing too much attention to itself. The techniques often overlap, but the intent shifts: where IDM prioritizes sonic innovation for its own sake, film sound must serve timing, emotion, and story. In both cases, though, sound design is applied sound art — and understanding how to shape, place, and transform sound remains a core compositional skill.
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.COLLATE
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.START
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.HEADING 1
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Reverb
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.HEADING 2
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What it is (brief, to the point)
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.HEADING 2
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How it's usually used
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.HEADING 2
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.HEADING 2
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What makes it musically boring or generic
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.HEADING 2
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How it can be used in IDM to create compelling, textured, rhythmically interesting sound
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.HEADING 2
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Creative examples or exercises that spark exploration
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.COLLATE
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.START
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.HEADING 1 microsound
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.BLOCKQUOTE
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Granular synthesis is based on the idea that a steady-state waveform with its time-invariant spectrum, although mathematically convenient, is a physical impossibility because a waveform cannot exist for all time. It stems from a theory of acoustical quanta postulated by Gabor, which recognizes that aural perception is performed in the time and frequency domains simutaneously. In this technique, the fundamental compositional elements that are used to to weave the sound are /grains/: small bursts of energy encased in an envelope. This term is attributed to I. Xenakis who detailed an extensive theory of grain selection.
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.RIGHT
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\[em] Charles Dodge, /Computer Music/
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.BLOCKQUOTE END
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.COLLATE
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\" Synchronous vs asynchoronous production mode
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\" 5 to 50 ms
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.START
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phase vocoding
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.COLLATE
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.START
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alternative tunings
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.COLLATE
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