We had a really constructive meeting today where we discussed how best to present our work so far for the first submission in a couple of weeks. Although we have not yet talked it over with our group supervisors, we felt it'd be beneficial to do some rough planning which we can adapt over the next few weeks.
We aim to submit a written document, probably in the region of 2000 words, in which we will explain everything about our project so far. We spent a lot of time discussing what should be included in this document and what the structure should be etc. We came up with the following guideline...
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Overview/Proposal:
Give a brief introduction to the project and state our proposal. Our proposal will be along the lines of "using the art of circuit-bending we will transform seemingly dull instruments, as well as kids toys and other found objects, into new, exciting and eccentric sound-machines capable of producing vast and varied sound textures, far removed from their original forms. Using these hybrid instruments we will perform a semi-improvisational piece of music in front of our peers, probably at In Space. The performance may include elements of interactivity whereby audience members can participate by 'playing' these modified machines. Blah blah more stuff to add here........."
---Obviously it will be far more fleshed out than that, i've just written that quickly. Having a good proposal to follow will be useful throughout the project I feel, as it will give us a vague guide to follow.
Technical Goals:
In this section we will set out our aspirations in terms of building things / programming things etc. It's where we can talk about circuit bending and what it means, as well as anything else that is technical. We may choose to include:
- Explanations of the hacks and modifications we've made
- Details or further hacks and modifications we hope to make / are still making
- Building some of Clive's guitar pedals into our circuits
- Using an arduino for input / output and what we can do with this
- How we might make an interactive element and the problems that could arise from it
- Using foot controllers to trigger things (this links to the arduino stuff - there is only 3 of us so using hands as well as feet lets us do more)
- Visuals - hacking a gameboy? combining with Jitter?
---There is loads of things we could talk about here. Let's keep discussing it and figure out what to write about!
Creative Goals:
Here we avoid any geek-chat and talk about all things creative. The most obvious part would be our compositional goals, which we discussed a little today. Because we are still lacking in hacked instruments it's hard to plan compositional stuff, because we don't know what sounds we can produce. So we could say - "we want to more from atmospheric textures to a more granular, possibly beat-oriented section blah blah" - but we don't know if that is going to be possible yet. We have talked about the kind of things we'd like to be able to achieve; it feels silly to write those things down just now - so we can talk about this side of things more and get a real compositional goal written down once we are more confident.
We can also talk about the actual performance here too; where? duration? visualisation? any interesting things we would like to incorporate to make it stand out from other presentations!?
Problems:
A section to talk about the numerous problems we have encountered so far, such as circuits breaking easily, trouble getting our hands on equipment / things to bend. Hardware/software issues etc. We can say how we got round these problems and how we look to avoid future ones from happening.
Research:
Maybe have a section to talk about the reading we have done and how this has helped us so far. Whether its learning how to solder a toggle switch, or being inspired to hack a certain toy e.g. speak and spell. Not sure how much a section like this is needed?
Timeline/Plan/Summary:
Not really sure if all these things should have their own section or just be put together.
A timeline of our progression; this blog will come in handy! We can say what we did when.
Our plan/schedule for getting it done in time e.g. we aim to have all our modifications finished by week 9 so we can focus on compositional stuff from then on etc........
A summary of this whole document / the whole project - not sure if this is needed and what we would write if so! Just something to close with basically.
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All of the above is really open to change. We might choose to change the order of sections, or what is included in each section. Or that we don't need a section. It's just good to get ideas rolling early on so the final thing is as coherent and comprehensive as is needed.
We will soon delegate the writing of sections so we are not all writing the same thing! Saying that, if all 3 of us had a bash at writing a proposal, for instance, i'm sure we could use elements from each and have a really strong proposal.
We also plan to submit a few videos demonstrating our work. We have already made some of these, we did one today actually... i'll upload it in a separate post. We could have videos of individual hacks, possibly with some explanation narrated. It would be great to do a mini 'jam' video where the three of us improvise some music together to show an example of the sound textures we can create.
I'm going to stop writing now because this has gotten far too long and probably makes no sense!
Jordan
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