Introduction
Over the last decade, digital audio facilities have evolved from an infant technology,
to their present position as a primary force in the audio production. Hundreds of
thousands of composers and audio engineers benefit from the digital audio equipment,
comparing to the traditional analogue audio music production, the digital audio
production seems to offer more and different creative ideas with musical inspiration
and innovation.
The author of this musical composition project was trying use the material of a
traditional vocal singing from a native tribe in Taiwan, to combine with modern dance
genre of music.
The goal was to create a cross-genre musical work, using the traditional genre of
vocal material with modern genre of dance music. For the similar kind of work, there
are already many kinds of cross-genre creations, e.g. Bennett, 2003: ‘Chanter’ (Grit),
which combined the traditional Scottish bagpipe playing with the genre of electronic
and dance music.
But for the chosen vocal material of this project, it was surely an interesting and
exciting experience for the author to make a dance genre of musical composition,
especially using the vocal singing from Taiwan, which is his hometown.
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Background of Conceptions
Initial Conceptions
The author of this composition project is a professional recording engineer, who is a
certified Digidesign Pro Tools Music Operator. The author’s personal information
web page is located at the Internet World Wide Web page, at URL:
<http://training.digidesign.com/listings/index.cfm?page=user_listing&id=2824> (last
checked at 28 October 2008). He has also played the electronic bass guitar at amateur
level for eighteen years.
At the very initial stage of choosing the music style of this composition project,
the author made a decision to take advantage of his greater abilities, familiarity and
understanding in both digital audio workstation techniques and bass lines. This was to
make sure that the author would be as competent as possible to compose the music
piece. So the ‘Drum and Bass’ style music was chosen at the start.
Brief paragraphs of the history and the characters about “Drum and Bass” music
are quoted from Internet sources as below:
History
Drum and bass (commonly abbreviated to d&b, DnB, dnb, d'n'b, drum n bass, drum
2
& bass) is a type of electronic dance music also known as jungle which emerged in
the late 1980s. The genre is characterised by fast breakbeats (generally between
160–180 bpm, and also having occasional differences in some older compositions),
with heavy sub bass lines. Drum and bass began as an offshoot of the UK's rave scene
of the very early 90s, and over the first decade of its existence there were many
permutations in its style, incorporating elements from different musical genres.
(Internet WWW page, at
URL:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_and_bass > (version
current at 28 October 2008)).
Characters
Drum and bass (drum n bass, DnB) is an electronic music style. Drum and bass,
originally an offshoot of the United Kingdom breakbeat hard core and rave scene, came
into existence when people mixed reggae bass lines with sped-up hip hop breakbeats
and influences from techno pioneers such as raggamuffin DJ General Levy and other
DJs quickly became the stars of Drum and bass, then still called jungle. Producers such
as Goldie and 4 Hero transformed the current art and turned drum and bass in more
instrumental direction, spawning sub-genres like techstep and moving the genre closer
to techno. Some of the more popular and defining artists include Shy FX, Ed Rush &
Optical, LTJ Bukem, Goldie, and Roni Size.
(Internet WWW page, at URL: <http://www.jahsonic.com/DB.html>
(version current at 28 October 2008)).
Drum and Bass is a form of dance music in which the name is taken from the part of the
song where the music breaks down to just the drums and the bass. It is a relatively new
genre of dance music. It is really fast, usually around 140-170 beats per minute. The
oddity here, though, is that a lot of the singing and music in a drum and bass track plays
at half of this speed, so usually only the drums are moving this fast. This gives almost a
Coltrane-type of feeling to this genre, a sense of chaos and freedom that before was not
felt in the confines of electronic music.
(Internet WWW page, at URL:
<http://www.essortment.com/all/whatisdrumbas_rhbl.htm> (version
current at 28 October 2008)).
3
For the author, the chance of making a composition piece in ‘Drum and Bass’ style
music was surely attracting and exciting. After the decision was made to choose the
genre of ‘Drum and Bass’, more listening and study about the music style was needed.
In the beginning of the project work, the genre of ‘Drum and Bass’ was simply just
another kind of dance music to the author, but later on, by researching on the internet
and listening to drum and bass radio stations after the submission of the project
proposal, the author had found that ‘Drum and Bass’ style music to be more than
fascinating to him.
This realisation was because that ‘Drum and Bass’ style music has many ‘strong’
drum loops, which are accompanied with many theme continuous bass lines.
The meaning of the word ‘strong’ to describe the drum loops of ‘Drum and Bass’
style music is to emphasize the continuous power delivered by the elaborate ideas, so
that the audience do not want to turn the music off, and will be eagerly anticipating
the next section of music. At the same time, the bass line, which is always the bridge
to combine the drum rhythm parts with the melody parts within the whole tune, is
doing the competent job, and is also surely a pleasant reason for the author to work
with his project.
At the same time, the main reason why ‘Drum and Bass’ style music was chosen by
the author was mainly because by doing “Drum and Bass” style music, it is always
4
good that the music composers could have the ability to work in non-linear digital
audio editing operation environment. It is surely more competent and interesting for
the composer to experiment with digital audio effect plug-in software. This was with
the aim of taking advantage of digital audio production to handle the huge amount of
non-linear audio process to show the main characters of the ‘Drum and Bass’ genre
music, the discontinuous and electronic features.
Also, compared to making other kinds of music, the author has better
understanding of bass lines and music rhythm grooving. This surely helps to make the
music composition be more interesting.
About ‘Bei-Nan’ Tribe
The vocal singing used in this composition project was from a tribe in Taiwan,
‘Bei-Nan’.
The reason why the author chose the traditional vocal singing material from the
tribe, ‘Bei-Nan’, was because the chosen vocal singing material had several special
characteristics:

The melody was strong in characteristic to represent the native tribe in
Taiwan.
5

The lyrics were special in the way it grooves; especially it was one senior
female leading the singing, backed with the other younger female singers.

All the singers were singing in long duration of every note, at the BPM
(Beats Per Minute) of 95, in quaver or longer, which made it obvious to be
heard and not to be cloaked easily by the background music, especially
with the secco character of ‘Drum and Bass’ music.
One issue worth mentioning here: the author was one of the audio mastering
engineers when the vocal singing recording was made in 1999 at Taipei, Taiwan. By
using the recording five years later to make the author’s own composition piece was
just like to having a pleasant meeting and cooperation with old friends again.
The term of ‘Bei-Nan’ is the name of a historic tribe in Taiwan. The tribe is located at
the east part of Taiwan, right in the area where it is a pure pristine place for living,
dancing as well as singing songs.
In Taiwan, Bei-Nan people are good at artistic areas, especially in the singing
performance. Many singers from Bei-Nan are doing quite well in both the popular
music performances as well as in traditional singing performance using their own
native language.
All lyrics used in this music composition project was the traditional singing of the
6
Bei-Nan people, the lyrics are especially for the festival when people finish mowing
the lawn every year, and the lyrics are restricted to be sung by women only.
When ‘Drum and Bass’ meets ‘Bei-Nan’
The title of this composition is ‘d N bei-nan’. This was named with quite an
inspirational idea for combining the short appellative term for “Drum and Bass”,
which is often ‘d n b’, with the name of the Taiwan tribe, ‘Bei-Nan’, which begins
with the letter ‘B’, making it to be a new notional term, ‘d N bei-nan’.
The author was trying to research the musical possibilities using digital audio
production to combine the modern dance music style, Drum and Bass music, along
with the traditional lyrics, to explore into the musical creativity to see if any
possibilities would be suited to each other.
To combine the characteristics of ‘modern’ dance music and ‘traditional’ singing was
interesting. When people think about dance and electronic genre of music, usually
they would not expect the music to be accompanied with traditional vocal singing.
This project was trying to merge the two genres of music and to eliminate the
conflicts of the stereotype of the realisation.
7
Especially the lead vocal was an elder lady, the timbre of her singing was even
emphasising the contrast with the dance genre of music.
Approach
Technical Descriptions
Pro Tools Free Digital Audio Production Software was chosen by the author as the
main multi-track recorder application. Pro Tools Free was used for the editing and the
mixing application in the composition project as well. The reason for choosing the
certain software was merely because the author has better familiarity with Pro Tools
Digital Audio Production Software. Whilst he could use some other digital audio
production software, he has less familiarity with them, which would surely cause bad
influence on the composition work. For example, the author would have to spend more
time learning and getting familiar with the other new audio production software.
8
The Creative Decisions Made

Speed and Time Signature
According to the average speed of “Drum and Bass” music, from 160 to 180 BPMthe range was a rough suggestive value, which was mentioned earlier in this report,
the author chose the speed of 160 BPM at the outset.
For the speed of 160 BPM, it seemed like the speed was located at the slowest
value of the average area. But the reason for the author to choose 160 BPM was
mainly because it was the very first time for him to make a “Drum and Bass” music.
After trying in 170 and 180 BPM, the author had found that by using higher speed in
BPM, it was somehow raising the difficulties for the author himself to express his
ideas and the details of music, so the value of 160 BPM was chosen at that moment.
The time signature of the composition was 8/4. The reason for choosing the time
signature of 8/4 but not the values to be 6/4, 4/4 or the other shorter value was
because the author wanted to make the musical phrases to be more in whole sheet-like
music. By the time signature he could deliver the music session in a more complete
way trying to avoid being secco with the music phrase description.
9

Slice the vocal singing
In the composition, the author used the method of slicing the vocal singing into pieces
of very short duration into crotchet, quaver, semiquaver and demisemiquaver. The
method was originally inspired by a fantastic music, ‘My Red Hot Car’ (Squarepusher,
2001: Go Plastic).
The method was very interesting.
Slicing the vocal singing into pieces was making a dramatic change to the melodic
stream of music, and turning the character from melodic into rhythmic tempo. The
other great benefit of sliced vocal was even more significant. By slicing the vocal
singing into pieces, it was easy to add audio effects, e.g. pitch-shift, time-compression,
time-expansion, delay…etc, and the result of adding various effects to sliced vocal
singing was amazing and exciting.
The similar method with ‘slicing’ the audio data was to use the automatic ‘mute’
and ‘un-mute’ function on the digital audio software. By the powerful feature of the
computer audio software, people could ‘slice’ the audio in tiny time period, which
might be interesting for further audio processing.
10

Process the Materials for Drum Loops
At the initial stage of the composition work, the author was using plain drum
recordings and samples to compose the drum loops. Unfortunately, by using ‘plain’
materials, the quality of the drum loops was just that- ‘plain’.
Later on, to avoid the outcome being ‘plain’, the author changed the way he
processed the drum recordings and samples. He then started to process the audio
materials to make them sound ‘non-real’.
Being ‘non-real’ was not the meaning that the audiences could not tell if the drum
loops was drum loops or not, whilst they could still tell that the drum loops were
made from real drum playing. The goal of making the drum loops to be felt ‘non-real’
was to explore into the multiplicity and the possibilities of making music, which was
surely much enjoyable than using ‘plain’ material of drum recordings and samples to
compose the drum loops.

The Procedure of Making the Composition
According to some proper and efficient ways of making ‘Drum and Bass’ genre of
music, the author did the composition with many incorrect methods at the beginning
of the research, that the author did the composition with the drum loops, bass lines,
vocal singings, and other melody parts at the same time.
11
That was just like crawling slowly on the bars and beats one by one, which was an
unpleasant experience to the author.
Another difficulty was that since there were only eight audio tracks available on
Pro Tools Free Audio Software, it was easy for the author to run out of the available
audio tracks whilst more tracks were needed to be added to hold more audio
materials.
At the same time, to compose the music note by note and bar by bar with one after
one was somehow preventing the author from creating good flows of music making.
The author was in the rocky situation at that moment.
Luckily, after having the suggestion from Dr. Filed, the supervisor of the
composition project, the author had taken the advice to make the drum loops first.
“Make the drum loops first and make as many of them as possible”, an inspiring
suggestion from Dr. Field.
As to the author, the new logic of the procedure to make music was surely a great
advice, and that was because by making the drum loops first, without all the other
parts of the music, it saved great amount of the available audio tracks on Pro Tools
Free software. It was surely a great ease for the author to compose the drum loops
with the availability of eight audio tracks, which included the kick drum, snare drum,
hi-hat, hi-tom drum, low-tom drum, floor-tom drum and some other materials like
12
crash cymbals, ride cymbals and any appropriate percussion instrument playing.
One of the most fantastic benefits of ‘making the drum loops first’ was, by making
the drum loop parts ready, it was much easier to combine the loops with designed
bridges of any drum material or other music. For example to make the basic bridge
session, it was interesting to compose the bridge sessions between each drum loop
with the same kick drum material of the next drum loop and make the previous drum
loop lead to the next one.
It was also great for the author to overdub the bass lines playing, as well as any
needed low frequency audio material, which was the main character of the ‘Drum and
Bass’ music, to combine them with the other melodic music materials.
One of the advantages of doing the drum loops first was that the feeling of the
composition could be changed right away between different drum loops. And another
advantage was, by having many drum loops ready at that moment, the whole music
stream would not stay at the same or similar genre easily.
But there was a disadvantage caused by the differences of the fall between drum
loops might possibly be big gaps for the audience to enjoy the continuity of the whole
composition.
The key to ensuring that all the drum loops go well with each other was difficult,
that was to make sure the bridge sessions among all the drum loops are good enough
13
and proper.

Be Precise or Not?
It is common nowadays for the digital audio production software to have the basic
functions of trimming and aligning the audio file, the bars and beats alignments.
With the bars-beats alignment function in the digital audio software, composers
could process the audio files as precise as possible, just like using the MIDI sequencer
machine or computer application software to quantize with MIDI notes.
When the author was making all the drum loops of the composition, he had made
the decision to keep every individual note of the drum and percussion associated
materials in the grid. By processing the drum loops in grid, the author was trying to
make the drum loops as precise as possible.
Originally, the author was planning to make the drum loops be ‘free’. The
meaning of ‘free’ was not indicating that the drum loops would be out of tempo and in
a mess. The notes were just to be not that precise. This was by the personal live
performance experience of the author, because he was always enjoying the interactive
understanding with the drummer trying to create the fantastic sessions suddenly, and
this was also the reason that the author did not want a ‘machine drummer’ in his
music composition.
14
But after composing for one week, the author had found it difficult and not good
to let the drum tempo be free.
The main reason was that for filling the materials into the digital audio software
application, it was a ‘one-man job’ for the author himself. Having interactive relations
among different audio materials was simply adding to the difficulty of the
composition task.
And the role of the drum loops in ‘Drum and Bass’ genre music is just like the feet
of a human. If the feet of the people walked in random speed, it is easy for the people
to fall.
By those considerations, the author chose to make the drum loops to be precise in
beats.
But, for the process of the vocal materials, the author chose not to do them
precisely.
The reason was for the consideration of the character of the original vocal singing
material. Because the ladies were singing without any accompanying music, and they
did not have a metronome giving clicks to them whilst doing the recording. The result
of doing the recording under these conditions was that the tempo of the vocal singings
was not precise.
Fortunately, it was not a big problem with the composition piece.
15
There was not a strong reason to keep the singing precise. To make imagery again
on human body, the vocal as well as the other melodic parts of music could be like the
human’s hands, compared to the motion of feet, hands could have more freedom than
feet and the waving hands surely would not make people fall.
At the time, it was possible for the author to edit, trim or align the vocal singing
materials to make them precise, but it was unassailable that heavy jobs would be
needed for the author to do the editing on the vocal singing materials.
Under the considerations of choosing the decision to make the vocal singing to
have more feeling in grooving and avoid the huge amount of unnecessary work, the
author decided to make the vocal singings not be precisely in grid at that moment.

A powerful tool, tempo, pitch and time type software plug-in
There was a software effect plug-in, which had been used quite often in the whole
music composition process: the third party Audio Suite plug-ins, Pitch 'n Time (from
Serato Audio Research & Serato Corporation Ltd).
Since most of the audio material was recorded before the composition outset, it was
really difficult to combine all the audio files together in the audio project session
without any post-production to fit in the right tempo map, especially for the alignment
of the drum loop components, which needed precision.
16
Thanks to modern audio technology, there was a digital audio software product
which did a great help solving out the harry problem, it was ‘Pitch 'n Time’.
The reasons why the aforementioned audio software plug-in was so important were:

Audio length adjustment
The pre-recorded percussion material did not precisely fit the needs to be
put in the grid of the BPM in 160 and the signature of 8/4, when the drum
loops needed to be ‘precise’. In ‘Pitch 'n Time’, it had a fantastic function
that allows adjustment of the selected audio regions into desired time
length, without changing the pitch of the original material. The function
applied both to the scales of bars-beats and minutes-seconds measurements,
which was quite convenient for composers to count the length of audio
material.

Pitch shifting
The other great function of ‘Pitch 'n Time’ was, the pitch shifting.
The function was the author’s favourite.
The pitch shifting function in ‘Pitch 'n Time’ offered two useful modes
of algorithms: in relative pitch-shifting and linear pitch-shifting.
17
By relative pitch-shifting, the software allowed the author to have the
choices among 12 grid semitones both up and down to change the pitch of
the selected audio materials.
By linear pitch-shifting, it offered 12 semitones up and 120 semitones
down to the selected audio materials, whilst it did the pitch-shifting in linear
algorithm.
The author used the function of relative pitch-shifting to produce the other single notes
when he got only one note of the instrument and would like to have the other pitches
of the timbre. This was just like the function of the audio sampler, people input audio
source to the application, and then they could get the material in desired pitch.
Linear pitch-shifting was the author’s favourite; especially it offered 120
semitones down to the selected audio materials, which could tune the selected audio
to reach very low frequency. It was very helpful for drum and bass genre music
because usually the low frequency materials were used quite often in the drum loops.
There were many similar audio software applications offering the same function, e.g.
Digidesign’s ‘Time Comp-Exp/Pitch Shift’. But for the author’s own experience, he
would like to say ‘Pitch 'n Time’ was the best pitch-shifting software.
18
Compared to other products, ‘Pitch 'n Time’ was not only precise in pitch-shifting,
but also the resulting of distortion and out-of- phase were nearly imperceptible. The
amazing quality of changing the pitch was applied not only to the single notes of chosen
material, but also the whole chosen music material, which might contain multi-notes of
different kinds of audio sources.

Audio Monitoring
One of the most important issues of an audio work is the choice of monitoring system.
There were four studios where the author had been working for the project:
 Music Technology Studio, Department of Electronics, University of York.
U.K.
 Electroacoustic Music Studio. Department of Music, University of York,
U.K.
 rvw Studio. mrc, Music Research Centre, Department of Music, University
of York, U.K.
 Trevor Jones Control Room. mrc, Music Research Centre, Department of
Music, University of York, U.K.
19
Every studio is different with the audio equipment and the studio acoustic design,
so the quality of the audio playback is surely not the same.
The reason why the author wanted to raise the issue of the audio monitoring
quality is because he had used many low frequency sound materials in his work, e.g.
the audio samples for the kicks, but the quality of the low frequency sound materials
was different at each studio.
Since the author was always working with his computer using headphones, he had
found that the low frequency response in the headphone was far better comparing to
the monitors in Electroacoustic Music Studio and rvw Studio.
At that moment, the author had to make a choice in order to continue his work.
He chose to ‘trust’ his headphones and stereo at that moment.
This was because it was easy to have them handy. Also he could make an audio
CD any time to playback on stereo, which is the common device for most people to
listen to an audio CD.
So, for the best result to listen to this composition piece, it is suggested that the
audience should play the music on a computer or a regular stereo with a pair of good
headphones to get the best audio quality. (The author was working with Sony
Dynamic Stereo Headphones MDR-7506 Professional.)
20
Conclusion and Discussion
Resume of Achievements
A “Drum and Bass” style music, combining the traditional lyric singing of “Bei-Nan”
tribe from Taiwan, was done with digital audio production, the achievements were:

Combining the tradition vocal singing materials with the modern ‘Drum and Bass’
music to produce a cross-genre style composition.

Use digital audio production process to handle all audio source material to merge
two genre of music to fit with other.
Comparison with Original Proposal

Main Audio Workstation
The author was originally tending to use Pro Tools M-Box Digital Audio Workstation,
which has got 32 tracks of simultaneous voices for editing, mixing as well as
21
mastering. But due to considerations, Pro Tools Free Digital Audio Production
Software was chosen as the main audio software to process all the music.
Compared with Pro Tools M-Box Digital Audio Workstation, Pro Tools Free Digital
Audio Production Software has got only 8 tracks of simultaneous voices. This was
quite annoying to the author especially at the task of audio sequencing.
Decision was made by the author to make all the drum loops to be made separate
from the vocal, bass lines and other rhythm music mixing. The author bounced each
drum loop music into separate left mono and right mono audio files, and then
imported the mono files into the main audio project along with the vocal, bass lines
and other rhythm music to do the audio mixing.
By doing the bouncing process, the advantage was merging each drum loops
audio mixing into two tracks, which save up to six tracks of the space in the main
audio project session. But the disadvantage was that when the author needed to
change the setting of the individual tracks in the drum loop, he had to open the
individual drum loop session, make some change with the old mixing, then bounce
and import again into the main audio project session.
22

Audio Format
A production of a musical composition piece in 5.1 surround-sound audio format was
expected at the initial project proposal, but the final work of the musical composition
was in stereo audio format.
This was mainly due to the familiarity of the author himself with the surround-sound
audio production. Also the Pro Tools Free Digital Audio Production Software did not
support surround-audio format.
The complexities involved in the multi-channel digital audio production are much
more than stereo-channel audio production for sure. To avoid the unversed situation to
make the surround-sound piece, the author chose to select the stereo-channel audio
format instead of 5.1 surround-sound format.
Suggestions of Further Work

Device with More Audio Tracks Available
For further work in the future, the author would like to use the audio software
application with more audio tracks available to handle more audio material to
23
increase the content of the music composition.

Surround Sound Format
The author has done his composition in stereo-format of audio at the moment, but
multi-channel working would be worth trying for the next composition.

Different BPM and Time Signature
The choices of 160 BPM and the time signature of 8/4 were the author’s own
decision at the outset. Using a speed higher than 160 BPM or doing the
composition in a varying speed might be interesting.
Also, by choosing a different time signature might change the presentation of
the musical work. This is worth trying in the future as well.
24
References
Articles
Dunaway, D. K. (2000) ‘Digital radio production’ (New Media & Society, vol.2, no.1).
London, SAGE Publications.
Internet WWW page, at URL: <http://www.free-definition.com/Drum-and-bass.html>
(version current at 27 Aug 2008).
Internet WWW page, at URL: <http://www.jahsonic.com/DB.html> (version current
at 27 Aug 2008).
Musical Works
Bennett, M. (2003) ‘Chanter’ (Grit). Corsham, Real World Records Ltd.
Chi, H.C. (1999) ‘Emaya-A-Yam I Traditional’ (The Sound of Sun Wind and Lea).
Taipei, Rock Music Publishing Co., Ltd.
25
Chi, H.C. (1999) ‘Emaya-A-Yam II Modern’ (The Sound of Sun Wind and Lea).
Taipei, Rock Music Publishing Co., Ltd.
Macdonald, R. (2004 May) ‘1000 drum samples’ (Computer Music). Bath, Future
Publishing.
Macdonald, R. (2004 June) ‘CM Tracktion demo’ (Computer Music). Bath, Future
Publishing.
Pettengale, P. (2004 May) ‘Guitar and Bass Samples’ (Music Tech Magazine).
Corsham, Anthem Publishing Ltd.
Pettengale, P. (2004 July) ‘Platinum Loops’ (Music Tech Magazine). Corsham,
Anthem Publishing Ltd.
Pettengale, P. (2004 August) ‘Discovery Sound Samples’ (Music Tech Magazine).
Corsham, Anthem Publishing Ltd.
Seelig, W. (2004) ‘1000+ Samples’ (Digital DJ). Bath, Future Publishing.
26
Squarepusher. (2001) ‘My Red Hot Car’ (Go Plastic). London, Warp Records
Limited.
Bibliography
Baranovitch, N. (2003) China’s new voices: popular music, ethnicity, gender, and
politics, 1978-1997. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Frith, S. (2004) Popular music: critical concepts. London, Routledge.
Huber, M. H. & Runstein, R. E. (1974/R2001) Modern Recording Techniques. Woburn,
Focal Press.
Manning, P. D. (1985/R1993) Electronic and computer music. Oxford, Clarendon
Press.
Middleton, R. (1990) Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia, Open University Press.
Middleton, R. (2000) Reading pop: Approaches to Textual analysis in Popular Music.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
27
Miranda, E. R. (2001) Composing music with computers. Oxford, Focal Press.
Sharpiro, P. (1999) Drum ‘n’ bass THE ROUGH GUIDE. London, Rough Guides.
Shuker, R. (2001) Understanding popular music. London, Routledge.
Toop, D. (1999) Exotica: fabricated soundscapes in a real world. London, Serpent’s
Tail.
Truax, B. (1984) Acoustic communication. Norwood, Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Wall, T. (2003) Studying popular music culture. London, Hodder.
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Appendices
Audio CD Track List
Track 1: Length
1 Min. 00 Sec.
Recorded Silence
0 Min.
Reference Tone 0 dB, 1 kHz 0 Min.
Recorded Silence
Track 2: Length
5 Min.
0 Min.
15 Sec.
30 Sec.
15 Sec.
02 Sec.
Recorded Silence
0 Min.
Composition “d N bei-nan” 5 Min.
01 Sec.
01 Sec.
Data CD Content Directory
Folders and contents list:
Audio Samples (Windows compatible)
From Computer Music
From Digital DJ
From Music Tech Magazine
29
From Rock Music Publishing
From Charles Gregory
Composition Audio Sessions (Macintosh format, Pro Tools Version 5.0.1 data)
Track 1 Reference Tone
Track 2
Main Composition (The Final Piece)/ with ten drum loop
sessions.
Track 3
Previous composition (abandoned)
Project Report Documents (Windows compatible)
Final Report
:
report.doc
Summary Paper
:
s_p.pdf
Audio Source and Facilities
The author was making the musical composition with the sound recording, audio
samples, digital audio facilities and the recording studios listed below:
Sound sources obtained:
30

Acoustic drums and percussion audio recordings, which were performed
by Charles Gregory, and recorded by the author himself at the Electronic
Recording Studio, The University of York.

Royalty free audio samples from:

Computer Music, Future Publishing.

Digital DJ, Future Publishing.

Music Tech Magazine, Anthem Publishing Ltd.
(The copyright confirmations are listed in appendices)

Lyrics of traditional singing recordings, from Bei-Nan tribe, 1999 Taiwan.
Licence cleared recordings from:

Rock Records Co., Ltd., Taiwan.

Rock Music Publishing Co., Ltd., Taiwan.
(The copyright confirmations are listed in appendices)
Digital recording and editing facilities:

Pro Tools Free Digital Audio Production Software for Macintosh, software
version 5.0.1, Digidesign Corp.

Apple iBook G3-900 Laptop computer.
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Recording Studio

Electronic Recording Studio, Department of Electronics, University of
York.
Software Plug-ins for use in Pro Tools



Digidesign DIGI-RACK Real Time Audio Suite plug-ins:

Dither

Dynamics II

EQ II

Mod Delay
Digidesign DIGI-RACK Audio Suite plug-ins:

Normalize/ Gain Change

Reverse/ DC Removal

Time Comp-Exp/ Pitch Shift
Third Party Real Time Audio Suite plug-ins:

GRM Tools Classic RTAS Bundle, Electronic Music Foundation, Ltd.
Shuffling
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
GRM Tools ST RTAS Bundle, Electronic Music Foundation, Ltd.
FreqShift

Third Party Audio Suite plug-ins:
Pitch 'n Time, Serato Audio Research & Serato Corporation Ltd.
About Digital Audio Technology
This project used digital audio production to explore musical creativity. Due to the
advantages of digital production, the musical imagination could be totally different
from the tunes made by traditional ways of composition. It is for sure that by using
different facilities, with the same composer would get different music work. Also, due
to the non-linear character of digital audio production, it is possible for an individual
even with little formal music training or knowledge to make some music pieces.
According to Dunaway, who had mentioned the characteristics of digital audio
production:
… New tools are certainly available, and some have powerful agency for artistic
expression.
Here is a partial list:
1. Poor recordings can be cleaned up more easily and precisely: noise can be charted
and deleted as needed – a pencil-like tool even redraws the soundwave to obliterate
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clicks. All of these together open up vast archives of sounds too early or poorly
recorded to use.
2. Fades can be automated, allowing the sound to recede with near-infinite
gradualness and volume settings.
3. Editing and mixing are far more precise, opening previously unimaginable
possibilities.
4. Sounds can be prolonged, without changing their pitch.
5. The editing process is visual-centric, performed on a screen.
6. Experimentation is encouraged: by the ‘undo’ command and by storage of alternate
mixes, which permit instant reversion of recorded material to an earlier form.
(Dunaway, 2000:30–31)
The six issues indicated here are quite into the details of the characteristics of
digital audio production, also they are actually some of the operations that traditional
analogue audio production could not easily accomplish.
Also, due to the special properties of the digital audio facilities, by using digital
audio workstation doing the audio production, the precision of editing the audio data
is easy to be accurate. This is in contrast to analogue audio facilities, especially in the
aspects of audio editing process. Nowadays, almost every digital audio workstation is
built on computerised system, which is usually accompanied with video screen to help
processing the audio data with visual effects.
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For example, if an audio engineer or an electronic musician wanted to have a cue
at the beginning of a sound recording on a digital audio production system, it is more
precise and easy doing the same procedure than with tape-machine recorder. This is
because the engineers or the electronic musicians can “see” the waveforms in the
computer video monitor, accompanying the auditory monitoring. But if people were
doing this kind of editing with analogue tape-machine based audio editing, the
engineers or the electronic musicians could only access to auditory monitoring with
lower precision.
Also, the popular sampling rate of digital audio workstations nowadays is up to
192 kHz, which means the engineers or the electronic musicians are able to “cut” the
audio data into slices, with the time period of 1/ 192,000 second. To do the audio
editing jobs with such tiny period, musicians and engineers can make superfine
editing with the time domain on the sound data with better precision, compared to
traditional tape-machine recording.
By the great help of the computerised facilities, the quality of meeting the needs
of changing the recorded audio data in length, tempo or pitch on most digital audio
workstation is highly improved as well. For example, at the infant stage of digital
audio production, it was always annoying that distortion would happen after the audio
engineers changed the pitch of the audio recording. But nowadays, with the modern
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digital audio technology, the resulting distortion is no longer that obvious, which
make the engineers feel more comfortable to changing the recorded audio data in
length, tempo or pitch, if it is essential to the music production.
The ‘undo’ command of computer software is another fantastic gift for digital
audio engineers. With the ‘undo’ command, engineers can do more experiments with
the recording, editing, mixing or mastering jobs, without losing any takes which they
might want to keep for reference or for some more options of choice after several
versions of editing or mixing tasks. The “undo” command seems to be almost
impossible for audio engineers to accomplish with the traditional audio tape recording
facilities, but it is easy to be accomplished with digital-based audio production
system.
Lyrics and the Credits

Lyrics
bu tungaw tu sauraw la e
bu tungaw tu sauraw la e ya...
tinu taudung tinukalipang la e
tinu taudung tinukalipang ya...
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mare dadawle mare sasaure la e
mare dadawle mare sasaure ya...
may ting ting may teb teb la e
may ting ting may teb teb la e ya...
maumaumale madayadayare la e
maumaumale madayadayare ya...
i ya a i pududusaw kaayaman ya...
han i ya a i kalayulayu kaumalan ya...
han i ya a i sungalaw karanuban ya...

Credits
Artist
:
Hsiao-Chun Chi.
Song Title
:
Emaya-A-Yam II Modern
Composer
:
Bei-Nan Nan Wang Traditional Madrigal
Author
:
Bei-Nan Nan Wang Traditional Madrigal
OP
:
Nan Wang Community Developing Association, Tai-Dong,
:
ROCK MUSIC PUBLISHING CO.,
Taiwan.
SP
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