Music Software comes in many different guises, some for producing musical scores which can be read and played by instrumentalists or performed by ensembles, choirs and orchestras. In today’s technological environment an even more exciting development in the field of music software is that of the creation of new sounds and compositions which can be directly played on a computer, later to be written to a CD for musical enjoyment, or performed on loudspeakers, as a special sound-programme in its own right. Even more use is made of special sound-creations in the media – as sound-tracks for film or television, as accompaniments to theatre productions, or audio-visual extravaganzas of every conceivable type. These productions are increasingly facilitated by a special type of music software, well represented by WellSpringMusic’s ProcessPack program. This is an application written and designed by musicians who have grown up in the developing field of electronic music. They were involved in establishing the UK’s first University electronic music studio back in the 1960s, and were among the country’s earliest practitioners of the creation of musical sound by means of the computer.
These days a studio dedicated to the art of producing new sounds, desirable as it is, may not be entirely necessary for the new art forms, as very sophisticated sound processes can be employed to create new sounds and new musical compositions on a home computer. A sound artist or musical composer may begin with any recorded sound as a starting-point. Specially chosen recorded sounds are the first step. Above all, the musician uses his or her highly-trained ear to select what are the most interesting, intriguing, and beguiling sounds from which to assemble a sound-composition. Having collected a set of recordings to use as the source, it is then essential to use the most appropriate music software to achieve transformations and manipulations of these sounds that will form the building-blocks of the new musical composition.
ProcessPack, as an example of sound-processing music software, is an environment which offers many different sorts of treatment of the user’s collected sounds. We can start with one called ‘Dispersal’. Here the main idea is to cut up the sound-source into as many chunks as desired, manipulate them by transposition – the process of moving the sound upwards or downwards in pitch, and to re-assemble them into a sound of a specific desired length. The maximum number of sound-fragments, or ‘chunks’, that can be manipulated in any one process is 999! The strategy of how the fragments are made is chosen by the user, and can be a constant length or a random selection of lengths within defined limits, and so on. The lengths of the chunks can be very short – as short as 0.16”.
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