Week 6 - Meeting with Dr T

This was it... the most daunting moment of the project to date.

Meeting with Dr T.

Now I know Dr T is a very supportive lecturer when it comes to sharing ideas and all but I knew that somewhere in his head he'll be making notes for our collaboration mark somewhere. This only made the importance of this meeting greater and I did have a sense of worry that from past experiences, Peer B may try to overcomplicate the explanations of the technological aspect of the project. Accessibility was key here so that we could all be on the same level playing field of understanding both as a group and with the lecturer. After a quick message to Peer B to remind him of this - we were good to go!

I summarise the most important three things to come out of the meeting below:

Lecturer Meeting : 19th March 4:00pm-4:30pm

Three of the most important things to consider and reflect:

• My private discussion with Peer A regarding our involvement of the project seemed to reflect the outsider views that Tom was having. Although I am an 'emerging' electronic composer, the challenge was how could I bring a different input to the group - given that Peer B would very likely be able to do most of the things I could do within that genre. Once more, Peer A had even less knowledge of this genre so the question lies in how we can utilize Peer A's competancies to create a project that we couldn't have done ourselves? The mentioning of 'stations' in a larger compositional structure could be a good way of utalising all members in the group.
• Logistics for an installation will need to be considered. This nicely ties in with the Ames study where the room can offer a certain character to a performance, especially important if we were to persue an installation route. Taking into consideration other people's timetables would leave some constraint on when we were able to perform this live so it would be appropriate ,in my opinion, to start putting an initial date down (despite being months in advance) so there is one less thing to worry about and we have more chance of changing the date, should a curve-ball come our way. My strong knowledge of the Surrey DMM (one of my competancies) should be useful to get the logistical side of things arranged.
• Collaborating face to face after the half-term seemed like a wise choice. Despite my previous pre-conceptions of Zoom in our first meeting, I was shocked to see the success in online collaboration - with the added bonus of looking back at recorded documentation when it came to our blogs. However, the benefits of face to face collaboration, especially with a physical project like a sound installation, were important to take advantage of. As mentioned earlier, you are more likely to pick up subtle microgestures from someone who is face to face with you rather than with just a 2D screen - a vital importance when conveying and sharing ideas with one another.

I'm not going to go into much more detail about the solutions to these questions/problems that we discussed in today's session as time is needed to ponder and reflect on these new ideas. What I reminded everyone, at the previous session, was that we still have 10 weeks to realise our final project. As Tom said in today's session 'Don't set anything in stone'. There is plenty of time to still not have a completely fixed idea (even though we did agree that we should get the theme confirmed this week) and time to allow us to discover as many musical paths that we havn't forseen in our first few weeks of collaborating. These thoughts also supports Sawyer's statement of keeping things open for as long as possible - mentioned at our first meeting.