Mary Helen Snow McCarty (26 August 1928 - 14 October 2012) was an American composer, [1] organist/pianist, and publisher who wrote The Waveform Music Book: Composing, Teaching, Performing Electronic Music with the ARP 2600 Synthesizer in 1977. She published most of her work under the names Mary Snow or Mary McCarty Snow. [2] [3]
Snow was born in Brownsville, Texas, [4] to Carrie Beth Sewell and Harry Evans Snow. She married Darrell Keith McCarty in 1951. They had four children before divorcing in 1981. She and her husband formed the Lariken Press publishing company, which published her Waveform Music Book. [2]
Snow earned a B.A. at Indiana University and a M.M. at the University of Illinois. [5] Her teachers included Anis Fuleihan and Burrill Philips. She gave private piano lessons, taught at Texas Technological University, and served as an organist at several churches in Lubbock, Texas: the First Christian Church, First Covenant Presbyterian Church, Forrest Heights Methodist Church, and St. Christopher's Episcopal Church. She also established the Lubbock chapter of People Against Violent Crimes, and created a fundraiser for the organization called the “Bach-a-Thon.” [6]
Snow received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977 and 1980, as well as a grant from Texas Technological University to compose a work based on desert land cultures. [6] She composed electronic music for university theatre productions (listed below). Her works were published by the American Music Center, [7] I. E. Clark, [8] and Lariken Press. [2] They include:
Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means. Pure electronic instruments depended entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer. Electromechanical instruments can have mechanical parts such as strings, hammers, and electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and the electric guitar.
An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.
ARP Instruments, Inc. was a Lexington, Massachusetts manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, founded by Alan Robert Pearlman in 1969. It created a popular and commercially successful range of synthesizers throughout the 1970s before declaring bankruptcy in 1981. The company earned a reputation for producing excellent sounding, innovative instruments and was granted several patents for the technology it developed.
The ARP 2600 is a semi-modular analog subtractive audio synthesizer produced by ARP Instruments, Inc.
Herbert Brün was a composer, pioneer of electronic and computer music, and cybernetician. Born in Berlin, Germany, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1962 until he retired, several years before his death.
A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and frequency modulation synthesis. These sounds may be altered by components such as filters, which cut or boost frequencies; envelopes, which control articulation, or how notes begin and end; and low-frequency oscillators, which modulate parameters such as pitch, volume, or filter characteristics affecting timbre. Synthesizers are typically played with keyboards or controlled by sequencers, software or other instruments, and may be synchronized to other equipment via MIDI.
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