Process Reflection

This process has been different for me than how I usually work. My group's direction has evolved into a performance I would have never expected to go in. Because we began our process with a technical stance of learning about piezo microphones, we had to build the piece from their use. We never played music much with each other. Instead the group experimented with sounds and imagined what objects would sound like amplified by a piezo. I then created an Ableton session to process and manipulate the sounds. This entire process has therefore been entirely experimental. Its multidisciplinary aspects are more related to theatre and electronics rather than music and electronics. The result has created a theatrical and sonically heavy performance.

Process Reflection

The process for this project has been inseparable from the product in a way because we are always tweaking things and working out creative solutions to hiccups in the performance. There has been a lot of humor gluing our efforts together and curiosity has been a helpful motivator. The process has taught me that our performance can be flavored in innumerable ways and that infusing our sense of humor with our curiosity can lead us to a unique presentation that deflects expectation and operates within it's own hierarchy of qualitative judgement. This circles around to the idea that the quality of our performance is determined by the amount and focus of effort we put into its preparation. The major difficulty we have encountered is finding reasonable times to meet and rehearse between our busy schedules. Because we are in a small group and the rehearsal's effectiveness is largely dependent on how many of us are present, we are picky about meeting all together.

Week 12

Our objective throughout the past weeks has been mainly on becoming comfortable performing with each other, and learning how to communicate musically. This has been different from how I normally work in groups, as here there isn't a very concrete goal that we have to achieve, and it is all about feeling it out. It is different than how I've worked with bands in the past, as we have had some riff or idea, that we then worked towards molding into a full song. Since our performance is mainly improvisation-based, it has been less about song structure and more about communication. We are all musicians, but something that has been more challenging is the fact that we all come from very different musical backgrounds, so we approach musical collaboration differently. Another challenge we've had to juggle is time management. We've been meeting once a week outside of class to jam and get the overall "structure" of our performance down, but sometimes we feel as though we are spending too much time on the music and neglecting the visuals, or vice versa. What we've come to find most beneficial is getting set up before class so we can get right to jamming, and then spend the second half of class working on visuals. I definitely feel a lot more comfortable improvising with new people than I did when I started in January, as I've learned to leave space for other musicians and always be LISTENING. 

Process Reflection

I think the process of this performance has been very different from how I usually work. A lot of this stems from our original ideas of what we wanted the piece to be- rather than having an idea of what the finished product would be, and working backwards to achieve it, we started with the "seed idea" of using contact mics to create our piece, and then found something that we though would serve this conception the best.

I think that we didn't really have too many interdisciplinary challenges- we all have different preferences and interests, but I felt that we more or less always spoke the same disciplinary language, and come from a relatively similar creative experience.

While I think our process would work well in a long-term collaboration, because it allows for more full exploration of the field, there were some challenges working in such a limited timeframe. Other groups that had a more clear aesthetic idea were able to progress more quickly because they had a definite conception of what their piece would be, whereas it felt like we spent a long time exploring the contact mic medium before ending up where we did. One method isn't necessarily better than the other, one may just be more appropriate for the circumstances.

Performance 2 reflection

At the second class presentation, our group presented a much more focused project than the previous presentation, and our goals for our project had morphed a lot also. We presented a board game-like instrument that had piezo contact microphones attached to it's various surfaces in order to pick up different sounds from the attached objects. The structure of our performance followed a 4-phase plan that centered around game-like movements and character embodiments. We were not finely practiced enough leading up to this performance to really trust that everybody knew what to do at the right time, so we were all a bit hesitant in our roles. The class's comments were helpful for us, as they highlighted the portions of our performance that needed a bit more attention in both the performative aspect and the structural aspect. This performance served as a nice trial run for our idea and Professor Gurevich's suggestion to re-do and clean up our instrument design was a disappointing but understandable next step forward to take.