Ian Macchiusi

York University, Music, Faculty of Fine Arts, Graduate Student

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Phd. Candidate ABD. Drummer.
Interested in popular music and software.

Conferences

IASPM Canada Hamilton 2013: Music and Labour.
Paper presentation: “Fragmented, Industrialized...Bought and Sold:” The History of Loops as Commodities.

McGill Music Graduate Symposium: March 2015.
Paper Presentation: Sample-based Music, The Digital Audio Workstation and Visual Representations of Musical Time.

IASPM CANADA Ottawa 2015: Visual Frames.
Paper presentation: “Knowing is Seeing:” The Digital Audio Workstation and the Visualization of Sound.

CogMIR 2015: Ryerson University.
Presentation: “Working in audio is more fun”: The digital audio workstation, rendering and the language of manipulation.
Supervisors: Rob Bowman, Rob van der Bliek, and Marc Couroux

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Papers by Ian Macchiusi

Knowing is Seeing:" The Digital Audio Workstation and the Visualization of Sound

The computer’s visual representation of sound has revolutionized the creation of music through th... more The computer’s visual representation of sound has revolutionized the creation of music through the interface of the Digital Audio Workstation software (DAW). With the rise of DAWbased composition in popular music styles, many artists’ sole experience of musical creation is through the computer screen. I assert that the particular sonic visualizations of the DAW propagate certain assumptions about music, influencing aesthetics and adding new visuallybased parameters to the creative process. I believe many of these new parameters are greatly indebted to the visual structures, interactional dictates and standardizations (such as the office metaphor depicted by operating systems such as Apple’s OS and Microsoft’s Windows) of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Whether manipulating text, video or audio, a user’s interaction with the GUI is usually structured in the same manner—clicking on windows, icons and menus with a mouse-driven cursor. Focussing on the dialogs from the Reddit commun...

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“Circus Tricks with the Sound:” Play, Agency and Manipulation in the DAW.

The computer’s visual representation of sound has revolutionized the creation of sample-based mus... more The computer’s visual representation of sound has revolutionized the creation of sample-based music through the interface of the Digital Audio Workstation software (DAW). With the rise of DAW-based composition in popular music styles, many artists’ sole experience of musical creation is through the computer screen. I assert, the particular sonic visualizations of the DAW propagate certain assumptions about music, influencing aesthetics and adding new visually-based parameters to musical composition. For instance, to many users, the complexity and structure of the DAW’s visual feedback seems to impart greater feelings of control, pleasure and mastery than the representations that offer less visual detail. Often, this optically influenced sense of enjoyment and agency encourages increased compositional manipulation, as well as a creative process that foregrounds free play and experimentation. An analysis of the impact of this type of visual interactivity will be furnished through the depiction of the interface concept of Direct Manipulation, as well as an examination of the online DAW communities of Reddit and futureproducers.com.

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Looped Affordances: The History and Process of Looping with the DAW.

As a formative compositional element in many producer’s musical style, there are many features an... more As a formative compositional element in many producer’s musical style, there are many features and visual structures within the DAW dedicated to the creation of the loop. With this in mind, I will discuss the DAW’s layout and unpack various functions and representations, as well as examining the affordances of specific DAW packages and comparing their looping credentials. I will then provide a history of the loop and recording technology, investigating perceptual and conceptual features of looped recordings, portraying various musicians and genres, as well as explicating how the technologically transgressive act of looping became concretized in many of the DAW’s methods for manipulating music.

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Article Review: Records that Play: The Present Past in Sampling Practice by Vanessa Chang

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“Like Juggling”: Tactics and Strategies in Sample-Based Hip-Hop

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“the comet tail that trails behind it:” Percussive Durations in Electronic Dance Music

Logically, how sounds cease must be half of the story… (Keil 1995, 7) The accent occurs on the bo... more Logically, how sounds cease must be half of the story… (Keil 1995, 7) The accent occurs on the boundary between two time spans, an old one and a new one. If only because of its novelty, the beginning of the new span attracts more attention than the end of the old one. (Schachter 1987, 6) With music composition software, percussion does not have to be subject to the laws of physics and acoustics; a single drum hit can be elongated for bars or truncated to a thirty-secondnote. This durational elasticity adds a whole new dimension to the creation of percussive and drum set 1 rhythms in Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Playing a drum set is an acoustically messy endeavour. Unlike instruments which can hold a consistent tone for a desired length, once a drum or cymbal is struck, the performer has little to no control over when the instruments will stop producing a sound 2 . Each component of the drum set-from the low booming kick drum, to the high resonant cymbals-has its own highly variable and imprecise rate of decay. Moreover, as the drum kit has no method to sustain an attack over a length of time, attempting to create a legato articulation between individual drum hits would be impossible. 3 Contrarily, in the realm of electronic dance music, this durational limitation is removed. EDM artist, Timothy Allan, asserts, "[drum] note length is one of the big things in House music or any Dance music" (Allan 2009a, 4:37). For this paper, my goal is to examine this assertion. In doing so, I will study drum

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"Cut and Paste Imagination: Mashups, Technology and the Aesthetics of Collage

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Ian Macchiusi

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