Reflection on Process

I normally do most of my musical work on my own and have full control over the compositional process. Being in this group where the piece is mutually created by all the members has been a big change for me, which I’ve enjoyed a lot. We all have different musical backgrounds, and it has been interesting to see what each member contributes to the direction we’re taking. Having different approaches to composition in general, we started with a large pool of ideas, which at the beginning slowed us down since we tried to employ as many of them as we could. But now, the ideas are finally fitting well together and we’re driven by the current state of the piece more than our initial ideas. We are now able to comfortably combine ideas from tech and music in a fitting way in the direction we’re headed.

One of the challenges we experienced was division of work. Since each one of us is skilled in a different field, it is sometimes hard to help each other out with their part. We’ve been managing this by taking extra time when we need to and trying to contribute through discussions. Often times, we weren’t able to experiment as much as we wanted to or go deeper in a certain direction for the sake of time and moving forward. On the other hand, we sometimes had to move back from an idea in which we went deep. We’ve recently started using more placeholders for things we can’t immediately get but have a common concept of what we want. This approach made things easier and faster, especially when the later work turned us away from an idea.

This was my first significant musical collaboration and piece that employs such complex tech aspects. Since I’m interested in the software and audio overlap and as I will be collaborating with others on my projects, I believe this experience is very valuable. I now understand how hard it can be to start a project by experimenting with others who have significantly different approaches, but I also understand that, with time, the process will find its way and teach us a lot.