The ASIJ music studio has become an invaluable tool for beginner and advanced composers. Using synthesizer workstations, students a various musical backgrounds can conceive, sequence or record, listen, and make critical aesthetic judgments about their own work. Each student completes the class with a DAT quality demo tape their own compositions from the semester.
Last year middle school students co-composed with their peers in Oldenburg, Germany a composition using the Internet. In Germany three eight bar melodies were created on their sequencer equipment. These MIDI song fragment or puzzle pieces were then encoded and e-mailed to ASIJ in Tokyo. Here students choose instrumentation, rhythm backup, and stylistic directions that reflected their influences in Asia and completed the song, "Tokyo Neon." This MIDI data was then scored for the middle school band and a live performance was taped by NHK television of Japan.
This year high school students, many whom have been composing in the lower grades, have been surfing the net to find what the future of music may be. It has not been uncommon to have homework e-mailed in this semester. Six to ten seconds song seem to be the comfortable downloading limit of the net at this time so students have explored the new sound bite format as modeled on HotWired. Can one express the complexity of music in six brief seconds? Fortunately not all compositions need to be miniaturized yet.
We are interested in more collaborative projects with musicians from around the world. We are currently teching up for a possible live via the internet MIDI jam, "NetJam." Composers, let us know what you're doing.
For more info or a bit of philosophical digression e-mail us:
bhuber@asij.ac.jp
Brent Huber -