Semester has started and my first class was Emerging Practices. This paper is difficult to define and it changes every time. It's seems to be normally something mildly performance oriented or just plain creative and conceptual. In some ways it's very much like Creative Technologies itself - hard to explain. I feel rather fortunate to have taken it this semester. We are going to be focusing on sound. The semester will be divided into 4 3-week blocks: recording a library of sounds, manipulating the sounds, creating some sort of composition from the sounds and finally mastering and polishing the composition. We'll be using among other things Ableton Live and Soundtrack Pro. I love playing with sound, but it's one of those things that I never find enough time for, much like my guitar that I once used to play. So to have a semesters worth of it will be great. It also sits well with another paper I'm doing at the same time, an external elective called Digital Audio Production. So I think I'll nicely zoned in with two harmonious papers.

I've borrowed a zoom recorder from the BCT loan centre and will be doing a lot of recording in the next few days. The aim is to get both a diverse collection of sound and also to consider what my theme or story will be for the final 5-minute composition. Whatever I do my own personal requirement is that it will be highly listenable. What's the point if listening to something just makes the listener think about getting to the end so they can go and do something else. Unless of course that is the point I suppose.

I have a few ideas already but they are subject to change once I begin recording.