Audio Editting

Audacity is an open source software used widely for audio editing.
Audacity use the LAME MP3 encoder to convert audio files into MP3 format.

See "Where Do You Create and Share Your Audio Files and Remixes?" at youtube for relevant suggestions.

The following are my current steps from collecting raw recording to compile into audio and video:

1) Digital voice recorder is first used to record the sound into wav format. The raw file is rather dry. This can be seen from the "ocean mist" wave shape when played in windows media player: one only sees some very small individual mist peaks, instead of the normal wide and abundant mist.

2) Open this raw file in Audacity and export it into MP3 or WAV format. Then the wave shape becomes normal. Audacity has the function to remove white noise, but trying it doesn't show that the effect was actually good due to sound distortion, so I gave up.

3) After this, windows movie maker can be used to incorporate the audio into a video, which can then be uploaded to youtube. In this step, one should use the audio file exported from Audacity. Using the raw file would result in plenty of noise, and sound quality totally screwed.

However, it should be noted that seems the automatic "processing" function of youtube would trim the video to remove silent ending. This leads to the loss of the last chord in the second version above, which appears in the end after a while of silence. That's bad. The solution is to add some variation to the end. Since the sound cannot be changed, an end title page can be added (change font color to be the same as background, so words won't show).

Online music resources

Youtube no doubt is a comprehensive source.

http://www.medici.tv is one dedicated to audiovisual programs in performing arts and documentary. It was launched on April 30, 2008.

http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page stands for the International Music Score Library Project. Lots of open source music scores can be found on this site. It went online on February 16, 2006.

Bach Inventions and Sinfonias

Bach wrote 2 collections of short fugue pieces for music education of his pupils. They became popular exercises for beginners. But of course their value is far more than just exercises.

The 15 2-part pieces are called inventions. The 15 3-part pieces are called sinfonias. These are numbered as BWV 772–801, altogether 30 pieces.

Here is an article on these inventions and sinfonias.

The performance of all these inventions and sinfonias by Glen Gould can be found on youtube.

I think these pieces are not particularly melodic. They are good demonstrations of fugue music though, and good finger exercises.

For inventions, I like No. 9 and No 13 most, especially No. 13, since I ever heard live performance on this.