Looking Outwards 10 – Computational Music

The project I am looking at for this week is Charlie Puth’s Attention (it’s a song). Charlie Puth is not a classically trained musician, so a lot of his self-produced music is made through computational software. For instance, for the verse of Attention, he recorded his voice just humming out the melody on voice memos on his phone. After uploading it to Pro Tools, he could choose the instrument he wanted to play that melody, and then go into a graph editor and change how that melody sounded without ever needing to pick up an instrument. He also was able to change the quality of the sound to achieve a different emotional effect subconsciously. He added tape cracks into the background to give the impression of analog music. I admire this project because it widens the sphere of accessibility to make music. As a person who always picked up instruments without ever truly succeeding at them, this is very appealing to me.

http//www.avid.com/pro-tools#Music-Creation