Week 2

The Homework.

The paper that I found on music technology was “Using electronic music technologies in music therapy: opportunities, limitations and clinical indications. The aim of the article was to make clinical recommendations on how to use technology in music therapy and comes to certain conclusions on which technologies and therapies are most effective. It draws off research recent research so has its points backed-up making the article seem quite informative. For quite a long article it has a fairly brief conclusion which, I felt, didn’t completely sum up some of the sections. However, there was a lot of technical jargon which I didn’t understand so I couldn’t get a full understanding of the paper. Throughout the paper it answers the questions that it asks in a clear and concise manner. It was published in 2008 so is not up to date and since then it’s only had 29 citations so that might make it less viable. Here is the link:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/135945750802200102?casa_token=_Tr4207sEgkAAAAA:tjsDw5_NR1TanFdO2ZqBnusDvI7uHaTxmXPxtFKhYg9UK6W9a_rY3jApSYQ70H0lT68xBvX7TNXL

Lecture Discussion.

We were tasked to think of an academic filed that we were interested in during the lecture, then find a name of an academic whose work interests us in that field, look them up on academia.edu and then see what we could find about our chosen topic through the rest of their work.

I decided to look for Live Coding and instantly found this article on “Algorithms as scores: coding live music” (http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/46861/1/Magnusson.pdf). Coincidently this was written by one of the tutors at Sussex university – Thor Magnusson. I went on to academia.edu and found a lot of other papers that he had written and eventually got onto a paper on “The Threnoscope” . (http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/46859/1/Magnusson_Live2013.pdf)

It was an interesting excerise aimed to show us how we can use authors as another means of searching for relevant articles, but I found academia.edu disappointing as to take full advantage of it’s resources you have to pay a subscription.

Other things that we discussed were the importance of a good essay structure, keeping a record of research activity, and to start thinking about research questions that we might want to answer in our essays

Essay thoughts and research.

I started thinking about how I might link music technology and film and decided that the process of music composition for film must have changed immensely over the last 90 years going from literally handwriting scores to using digital software to not only score a film but also play it without the need of real instruments. My first port of call was to have a look at a the book Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear by Neil Lerner, which got me thinking that maybe I should really focus onto a certain genre – horror. I then had a look at a couple of websites just to find some interesting points and came upon these articles https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-hidden-sounds-of-horror-movie-soundtracks-freak-you-out and http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161031-what-makes-a-great-horror-movie-soundtrack which got me thinking about the phycology of how with the advances of music technology we are able to understand what scares humans and therefore composers now should be able to create music which scientifically instils fear into an audience. I then decided to watch a couple of horror films. I watched “Physcho” – the classic Alfred Hitchcock with the ‘screachy’ violins which give me the chills and then I watched ‘A Quiet Place” – directed by John Krasinski which came out earlier this year. Despite the films premise – total silence at all times otherwise you might be malled to death by a sonically sensitive alien, I still had to watch half the film on mute because the music was so terrifying.