Week 1

The first lecture of the term was an introduction to the module aimed to give us an understanding of what we would accomplish by the end of the term.

The essay.

We started of talking about essay writing and which parts of essay writing we felt we were good and bad at. I decided that my main weakness is forming a strong argument: I am able to find good ideas and compare different sources in a plan, but when it comes to writing it in a succinct and concise argument my argument sometimes becomes vague. We were asked to think about a topic in music technology that ‘really interested’ us and my immediate thoughts were Artificial Intelligence and film music. I am interested in the possible uses of AI in music production and it’s almost infinite applications in life. Film music is something I really enjoy and something I would like to pursue as a career so spending a term researching it may be incredibly beneficial. Discussing how the technology has affected film music over a period of time would be interesting. The only thing I might find difficult with an essay with this sort of title may be being ‘critical’ as a pose to just discussing the history.

The Research.

It hadn’t dawned on me how much research would be needed for an essay of 4500 words. Previously, the largest essay I had written was 2500 words. We discussed the methods of finding references: journals, scientific documents, university papers etc. Using search tools like Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search and Scirus. We then had to think about how to maximize the productivity of these search engines by thinking laterally to find a wide range of research papers that would agree/disagree and give another angle to an argument.

The Homework.

We were set some work to over the week which involved finding a paper on a certain topic, which was decided to be music technology and health. We would have to create a summary of the paper (i.e. what are the key issues and question it deals with) and analyze it critically asking whether it is a good paper.