Next steps: Prospective programs and projects

**Meta — **Design, deploy, and document at http://shaunalynn.org/noise

If good music has Energy in its sound, this site has it visually—in its colors, motions, and interactions. It captures a sense of the novice, communicating quality through well-scoped visual design choices which mirror the types of trade-offs a novice musician must make in order to create great music. That said, it should also be functional, serving as a (relatively) static landing page and portfolio site for N&tN endeavors, similar to my personal site, with some spaces for sharing related resources, updates, etc.

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements:

1. A mock-up and site map 

2. Very brief description of my interest/direction of inquiry

3. Portfolio of "finished," documentation-worthy work, or at least layout for this

4. Ongoing wonderings, nuggets, questions, resources, AKA blog

**Short term project — **Small Scale Song Stereotype Snippets (5S)

Making music is different from studying music. It’s different from appreciating, listening to, analyzing, and doing comparisons of music. Making music is live, at least in part. Even when you’re in a studio, you have to sing, hit the drum, or hit the loop pedal. At some point, the rubber hits the road. In studying music, you can sit. You are meta. You can reflect and rewind and fast forward. I want to cultivate my ability to answer questions about music using the tools of close listening, programmatic analysis and comparison, and acoustical analysis and comparison.

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements—probably in the form of blog posts:

1. Challenging my musical stereotypes and assumptions by answering questions using Echonest and related APIs into song characteristics, e.g.

    1. Did Adele sing every chorus in Rolling in the Deep?

    2. Did Oasis really only write one song?

    3. Is all Dub Step at the same BPM?

2. Close listenings to specific solos and melodies to draw out patterns, decisions, and other aspects of the music which make it good, catchy, moving, etc.

3. Timbre portraits, comparing different sounds/instruments through language (woody, wet, sharp) and acoustical properties (spectral analysis, waveform, etc.)

**Longer term project — **Improvising Improvisation: Tips, Tricks, Stories

At School of HONK, anyone can try out solo improvisation. Whether you’re a professional sax player or it’s your first day playing the trombone, you’re welcome to participate in the group’s music in this way, contributing your unique, solo voice in an ensemble which, most of the time, relies entirely on members’ ability to listen and be an ensemble player. With different backgrounds, in life and musical training, this project seeks to collect the stories of why, when, and how people improvise at School of HONK. What notes do they play? How do they come up with musical ideas? Were they intimidated the first time? Are they still? How do they learn more and improve? What do they consider to be great improvisation?

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements:

  1. Collect video interviews with School of HONK members

  2. Code some of the common things they identify and describe to analyze

  3. Collect great, iconic improvisations and match with members’ criteria

**Program plan — **Musical Maps: Using our ears to remember & represent

When we hear the word “map,” our minds go first to visual artifacts. Whether they are traditional, spatial/geographical maps or nontraditional maps drawn with different projections or weighted by population or voter turnout or number of cows per hectare, they are all visual. To whatever extent maps are an attempt to represent and remember, however, there’s evidence that other senses might have something to contribute. Scientists have studied the direct connection between smell and memory. We’ve all experienced the way a song can bring you back to particular moment in your past. In this program, we will explore nontraditional ways to represent and remember information (as “maps”) and specifically look at how we can use sound and music, whether as the subjects represented in our maps or as the form or representation of some other subject.

Evocative projects and investigations:

1. Creating digital landscapes that are animated visually and aurally

2. Making interactive, musical memoirs, including templates to make this happen

3. Musical field guides laying out the various aspects of specific songs

4. Maps of hometown/childhood/a decade—laid out spatially, temporally, aurally

5. Creating a map of bands who influenced each other, sampling maps, etc.