On a Thursday, the eight students in School of Music room 2057 all face the wall. Each one sits at a workstation outfitted with a Korg Triton synthesizer connected to a speaker, a Mac desktop and a recording console that’s littered with buttons and knobs. This is PAT 201, “Introduction to Computer Music,” and the students are about to write what, for many of them, will be their first high-tech composition.

For Professor Jennifer Furr’s first assignment, students will fashion a short piece using Logic, the Apple, Inc. music production program preferred by the Performing Arts Technology department. Besides having to comply with some basic compositional rules (six or more tracks, “quantize” — artificially aligning the notes using Logic — where necessary), the students get to show off by picking from a list of specific techniques to apply to their compositions and must integrate some sort of synthetic “sweeping gesture,” Furr explained.

“It basically introduces students to electronic music, a little bit of historical survey — important pieces of electronic music over the past 50, 60, 70 years — and gets students working on their own projects,” explained Associate Professor and PAT Department Chair Jason Corey.

As complex as it seems — especially to the non-PAT students, for whom this is among the only courses of its kind available — PAT 201 is only the tip of the tech-arts iceberg.

In Corey’s “Contemporary Practices in Studio Production I” course, advanced PAT majors delve into the ins and outs of recording and mixing methodology. In a timbral ear training class, they learn to distinguish slight changes in frequency. And in Assistant Professor Georg Essl’s “Performance Systems,” the instrument of choice is the cell phone. By the end of the semester, students will actually perform a 100-percent cell-phonic piece that they compose themselves.

“Traditionally, there’s, ‘Here’s the instrument builder, here’s the performer, here’s the composer,’ ” said Essl, who has a joint appointment with the School of Engineering. “But (in ‘Performance Systems’) we’re kind of saying, ‘You know what, defining what an instrument should look like is like composing.’

“So we kind of break down those barriers and say, ‘You’re a little bit of an engineer, a little performer, a little bit of a composer, and we don’t have to honor those traditional roles.’ I think that’s kind of a PAT thing.”

From Garage to Studio

Many PAT majors were introduced to their future course of study by a technology hardly more professional than a cell phone: that irrepressible anyone-can-be-a-musician program, GarageBand.

“I started playing in a band my junior year of high school,” said PAT senior Peter Raymond. “After I started with the band, I realized I had GarageBand, and I had one microphone from connecting to a digital piano. So we originally just used that one microphone to record everything that we did. And then from there, I just started reading more about recording, and I decided that was really what I wanted to become involved in.”

Raymond decided to go out for PAT on a whim, after having already been accepted to LSA. For the application, he had to send in a portfolio with one stereo recording (two channels of sound), one multitrack (multiple mics picking up different musical parts, not necessarily at the same time) and a performance piece of his choosing.

“I didn’t have any technical training,” Raymond said — but he did read into the subject, and he did have Pro Tools (“kind of the big name in the recording industry,” he explained). Able to quickly compile the requisite pieces from his personal computer noodlings, Raymond applied one month before the MT&D deadline and was accepted.

That sort of gradual and casual introduction into the music production world isn’t specific to Raymond.