Thank you for visiting MusicTech@UNCG, the website of the Instructional Technology Consultant in the School of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This site was designed first as a tool to communicate updates on the status of technology at UNCG to the faculty in the School of Music. Over time it has grown into a portfolio of my work both in technology and music. If you would like to contact me about this site, please use the form found under the “CONTACT” tab. Thank you for your time.

Brian Thacker, site admininstrator

I’ve been asked for this several times, so I’ve created a quasi-template from my own dissertation for the proper formatting of the these content areas in the dissertation. It’s called a quasi-template because it is not a true “template” in the Word sense, but is ready for the user to type in their own content overtop of the existing text. If you need more sub-headings in the TOC, just copy and paste the one above it. To get your dots to line up, just use “Tab .” and they should be spaced properly. If you need help with this document please contact me.

Title-TOC-Acknowledgments Template

Several times I have been asked to recommend an audio software package for Windows that is similar in scope and simplicity as GarageBand on the  Mac. I’ve read about Mixcraft before and suggest that people look into it, but this week I am going to download the demo and do a comparison between these two projects. I will try to create the same song in both programs, list the differences in work flow between them, and then post MP3s of the resulting tunes for quasi-sonic comparison (both being mangled into the mp3 format). For equality sake, I will export the resultant songs to the native WAV or AIFF and then encode those files to MP3 using the same program for both to avoid any differences in encoder quality between the Mac and PC. Look for the complete comparison by the end of the week.

Mixcraft 4 - Affordable multi-track audio and MIDI recording software.

Brief article excerpted from a PDF book about GarageBand. Contains information about combining two GarageBand projects into one, something I have been trying to figure out with a few of my own ideas.

Macworld | Learn GarageBand tips and tricks

A historical event in electronic music has been rediscovered. The recordings of this early computer generated music sound very similar the double-reed instrument sounds found much later in the 1980s with the introduction of FM synthesis.

BBC NEWS | Technology | ‘Oldest’ computer music unveiled

Similar to their course on orchestration using the Rimsky-Korsakov treatise, Garritan is now offering a free online jazz arranging course.

Jazz Arranging Online

There is an interesting article in the June issue of Computer Music magazine about the perception of loudness in music as being a better performance to the human ear. It briefly discusses the tiny organ called the sacculus that has been linked to the response centers for pleasure in the brain. The included DVD with the magazine included a pdf of the article “The Seductive (Yet Destructive) Appeal of Loud Music” by Barry Blesser, Ph.D. This must explain why bass trombonists think they sound better than they really do ;)

A free virtual printer for Windows XP/Vista that creates PDF documents from any application that supports printing. Great application for creating your own PDFs from Word or PowerPoint documents. Download from the official website or look for a link in the “Download” section of this website.