Capella Tutorial

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Heinrich Taube
School of Music, University of Illinois
taube@uiuc.edu





INTRODUCTION

This tutorial steps through a small composition project to point out some of the basic features of Capella, a graphical interface to Common Music that runs in MCL on the Macintosh. The tutorial assumes that you built Common Music with the MIDI syntax enabled, and that you have a MIDI device attached to your Mac. Select a piano sound on your synthesizer for best effect. The following special marks are used:
<Return>        means press the return key.
<Click>         means select with the mouse.
APPLE-<Key>     means press <Key> with the Apple command key depressed.
=...=           marks a window title.
[...]           marks an icon.


OBJECTS AND BROWSERS

Capella provides a Common Music menu and two different types of windows. Worksheet windows support general activities like editing musical data, playing files, etc. Browser windows are context sensitive views on individual musical objects. One special browser, titled =Top-Level Listing=, is particularily important because it shows all the objects you have defined in the current session.



LISTENING TO OBJECTS

We start by listening to Tune1.



DUPLICATING MATERIAL



RENAMING OBJECTS



EDITING MATERIAL



SCHEDULING OBJECTS RELATIVE TO ONE ANOTHER

Now we will listen to Tune1 and Tune2 in canon.

CONDITIONAL EDITING

Next we will edit some of the material in Tune2.

LISTEN AGAIN

Now use =Output= to listen to both Tune1 and Tune2 in canon again:

STORING LAYOUTS

You can name, store and later retrieve layouts for use. The layout is now accessible via the pop-up menu to the left. This layout is preserved even if the =Output= window has been closed.



MAKING A THIRD VOICE

Next we build a bass line by duplicating Tune1, renaming the new object Tune3 and transposing its MIDI data down 2 octaves: Tune3 is now a slightly louder bass line two octaves below Tune1.



USING QUERY

Now we want to emphasize just the lowest tone in Tune3. But what is the lowest tone and which midi-notes contain it?

EMPHASIZING THE LOWEST PITCH



LISTENING IN PARALLEL

Now listen to Tune1, Tune2 and Tune3 with local start time offsets of 0, 5 and 10, respectively:

LISTENING IN SEQUENCE

Algo1 is an algorithm that creates chords using pseudo-random selection. We first listen to Algo1 several times understand its behavior :

LISTENING TO THE COMPOSITION



SAVING YOUR WORK



LEARNING MORE ABOUT COMMON MUSIC

Common Music Documentation.


hkt 17.11.95