Week 5a - On the Right Track

From the messages on the group chat and the first session we had, I felt confident that the group was friendly and will be self-motivated to do well. However, it was important to remember that this was very early on in the collaboration. Just like romantic relationships at the start, or at least from my few past-experiences of love, 'mutual discovery and a certain temporary fusion of individual personalities takes place' John-Steiner (2000). So although the atmosphere was positive, it was important to be cautious that motivation and other personality traits can be temporary at the start and pressures from other external forces later on may shift the group dynamic. 

Online Meeting 2 - 8th March 12:30pm-1:00pm

Here is a summary of the main points covered with some after-thoughts:

• At the beginning, Peer A raised the point about the time and effort that is required in producing and setting up a sound installation (a generalised theme we were leaning towards the most last time). Linking up to the John-Steiner, he did raise a good point that our idealised view of creating an effective sound installation in the modules time length was perhaps a bit rosy-eyed and that we might want to consider a more realistic solution within the time-frame.
• I mentioned about new kit that I purchased a few days ago for another module (Ableton 11, Push II Controller and SoftStep). This raised the point about how much equipment we had between the three of us. The answer... probably too much. With my experimental compositional background, Peer A's CMT background and Peer B's thousands of guitar pedals it seemed like we didn't have to go to too much trouble with purchasing any more than that. The challenge for the future is how could we reduce our selection of kit down to what is necessary for the project?
• As ideas started to dry up around a third of the way into the meeting, I used a similar strategy to last meeting where I showed my peers a video I watched on YouTube whilst doing some research into a different music module. The MaxforLive Connection Kit had some fascinating applications of Ableton which sparked Peer B's creativity (a major turning point in the meeting and view on the project). With it being free as well it was definitely worth exploring. The use of sensors was mentioned a lot in our first meeting and this seemed like a possible solution in bringing the 'interactive' aspect Peer A spoke about in the last meeting. The golf ball on the track was a major talking point - such a simple concept that could be mapped beautifully to music. The unintentional link to the 'Pachaballs' mentioned in the first meeting could have been the reason why it stuck as the maining talking point throughout this meeting.
• The final part of the meeting involved talking about the theme. The concept of a sound installation doesn't really hold together as a 'theme' title and we wern't a huge fan of using historical dates as inspiration. Following on from the video, I made the suggestion (using my competancies in the hope of dragging the project towards my Vgotsky's zones) of linking science and the arts by presenting a physical model that can be translated into a piece of music as a live installation. The theme was still loose at this point but the video was an excellent way of sparking new ideas. The sessions concluded with finding out that scottish contemporary composer Anna Meridith used 'tracks' as a way of creating a powerful visual in a video performance that was a hybrid between sound installation and recorded performance - something potentially worth considering in the future if we had to adapt our initial plans.

References

John-Steiner, Vera, 2000: Creative Collaboration. Oxford: Oxford University Press Ch.3 Page 83.