Week 10a - A telling off after my Birthday!
Picture the scene - 18th April I was sipping on a lovely cocktail with my family in the peak district talking about my future plans as I turned the old age of 22. I hear a PING from my phone - it's only Dr T wishing me a Happy Birthday! Life is good.
I planned my celebrations such that the next day I would have to wake-up bright and early at 6am in order to a get a lift from Manchester to Guildford in time for our first face to face session at 1pm. I sacrificed my sleep but I was ever so excited to start collaborating face to face - especially given that it was going to be a 'celebratory RtfPb session'!
So someone in this group has done a record 13 posts in their blog!...
An amazing feat - I realised why Dr T agreed to the celebratory session, it was to celebrate the determination and effort I had put in at this point to my blog to exceed the 1 post a week expectation that was required. My peers were about to appalud my impressive feat.
But more than half of them are blank.
... [too much of a diverting break perhaps?]
Enough awkward silences and roasting of our blogs - lets move on...
19th April Face to Face Meeting 12:00pm-4:00pm
- It was certainly an exciting time for us all as we were able to see the marble-run in action for the first time. Peer B spent a good amount of time in the easter-break setting up the equipment and also creating the arduino circuit board. So far, the two were seperate entities so the challenge for the future was how we could merge the two together and create a marble run that could connect to the arduino kit? It was certainly inspiring for both Peer A and myself to see it in action and see what fusions we could create with our instruments.
- Peer B also showed us a video that used machinery as a individual instrument with other instruments playing around it. This was fairly similar to ideas that were floating around in previous meetings where we would have multiple stations interacting with a central idea (in our case the marble run). The video also sparked a discussion in presentation and the importance of visuals. This was one of the competancies I mentioned at the start of the project so it seemed ideal for me to explore this further with relevant contacts once we had more of a firm concept.
- One major difference to the previous meetings was that Peer A and myself were experimenting and 'playing' with the different sounds avaliable. Even without the sensors on the marble-run we started experimenting with using the motor as a rhythmic backing for our work. Placing a microphone near to it allowed us to create some very unexpected sounds through various setups on Ableton such as 'Acid Dolphins' (1:09:00). The possibilities to warp the motor sound into anything we wanted was endless.
We also discussed a plan for future face to face sessions. With our Masters getting more intense as we were heading into deadline territory - we decided it would be worth setting Monday as the day to focus solely on Research Training. It was easy to remember and it also gave us time to reflect on each session before hopefully arriving into the next session with new ideas. Of course, we couldn't guarentee this for every session, as motivation in individuals is a variable factor in any group collaboration (Tuckman,1965), but hopefully the consistancy of our timings would benefit us all in the long-run.
Overall, it was a strong first session. For myself and Peer A, we felt we were contributing more in today's session than we have done in previous sessions because we were in the comfortable territory of using our own instruments. Collectively as a group, we didn't set our expectations too high at the beginning of the session to create any major ideas. This was a good mindset for us to begin the session in to avoid any disappointment at the end or to dampen the mood of the group. As Dr T rightly pointed out, 'use this as a play session to experiment' and we did exactly that. As a group, there were no concerns going forward into next week. The only thought that crossed my mind was how were we going to decide what notes to play in the installation/performance?