Week 5 Seminar: Moving Forwards (sonic structures)
This seminar is intended to continue our work on developing our understanding of designing sound in context. The focal question of the session is what might an instrumental approach to software design involve? How might it be useful for sound design, digital composition, live music performance. Come prepared to talk about the questions raised in your assigned text (see below).
Try to avoid approaching your paper in simplistic terms of whether or not you agree or disagree with the proposal; rather try and get a feeling for what motivates the particular approach and whether the proposal seems like it could be effective.
You will need to be deliberate in your reading. It is rarely effective to try and read an article straight through at first. Rather, there are various tactics one can adopt to gain a basic understanding of the points being made before going in for more detail. In particular, a structured approach to skim reading is an essential skill to develop:
www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/reading-and-researching/skim-and-scan
Meanwhile, here is some broader advice and some resources from our Institute of Academic Development:
We’ve divided the class in to three parts for a manageable discussion. Please come to the session you selected on doodle having read the correct paper and made comments to this page below. You’ll want to be able to participate throughout so glance at the others papers too.
The Papers
- Farnell, An introduction to procedural audio and its application in computer games
- Hayes, Towards an Aethetics of Touch
- Ryan, Some remarks on musical instrument design at STEIM
NOTE to access the Hayes and Ryan papers, you’ll need to login via your Edinburgh University EASE credentials. It’s a bit of a search sometimes to find the insitutional login, but it’s worth going through this yourself as it opens up huge potential to access 10000s of papers out there that otherwise you’d never be able to download without paying.
Select a paper via the doodle poll, note that a time will be next to the paper, come at that time. We’re breaking the class into smaller groups this week to allow for more detailed conversation and discussion. Pick one of the slots and papers below: