Entries tagged with “composition” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

Learning to write good melodies is a great place to start. Let another composer provide the chord progressions and accompaniment for you, so that you can focus on nothing but a new melody.

A quick overview revealed the size of the task: I would have to produce about 4 hours of music, skit material and ambient sound to properly set the mood. In five days. With no wiggle room.

It's Halloween again, and what better way to set the mood than with a new soundscape album from Mark Greenfield, aka Darwin Chamber? Thanks to intelligent, computer-aided composition, it's much more immersive than the standard serving of ghost moans, melodramatic laughter, and werewolf howls.

Sounds like . . . Sennheiser. While updating my business card the other day, I started to think it would be cool to have an audio logo as well as a graphic one. You've certainly heard these "earcons" — the THX Deep Note, the Duracell coppertop clank, the Intel Inside chimes. . . . With just a few notes and...

Everyone has a song inside. On March 22 and 24, Apple Stores around the country will show you how to get it out of your head and into an MP3 you can submit to American Idol. Apple promises, You don't have to know how to play an instrument, write a song, or even sing in tune. With GarageBand and...

As part of today's feature article on making movies out of still photos, Michael W. and Debra Jean Dean whipped up this funny demonstration of good and bad background music. It contains five brief examples. See if you can figure out why each helps or hurts the presentation. Debra Jean reveals the answer after each segment. I burst out laughing...

When a photo is about pattern, the thrill of composition can come from a dissonance in size. Is the subject big or small? What is the sense of scale? In these kinds of photos, that which seems to be big is actually small, or that which appears to be small is actually big. The viewer gets a thrill when the...