Monday, October 30th, 2006
Having wasted most of Saturday afternoon’s session figuring out how to do the assignment the wrong way, I booked myself in for another 2 hours after tonight’s lecture. I’ve pretty much got to hand it in tonight since it’s due on Sunday night and I’m going to be away this weekend.
The second part of the assignment is to rearrange some musical notes being played by three different instruments, so that they play a scale in the correct order.
Now that i’ve decided to do it the easy way, that took about half an hour. Something else I’ve just figured is that he big headphones are blloody heavy, so it’s a good idea to give your neck a break and take them off when your not actually listening to stuff.
Friday, October 27th, 2006
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been given our first assignment. A basic editing task invloving rearranging some musical notes on a recording, and fixing/cleaning up some speech for a radio ad.
To that end, I made my first out-of-hours trip to the studio. I say studio, I mean room with 5 middle-aged Apple macs and another thing in the corner with lots of wires which, although I don’t know what it does, looks decidedly thirty-something.
The software we need to use is an application called PEAK. The first computer I logged onto doesn’t seem to have it installed, which I am told by the supervisor is correct, and I should have booked machine 4 or 5. Machine 4 being occuppied by a dude whose headphones are way too small for his afro, I relocated to machine 5, only to find that it’s PEAK Pro is a trial version, and the trial has expired. Joe Headphones seems to be using Pro though (mental note: book machine 4 next time!).
In my two hour session I think i’ve managed to cover at least half of the exercise, and a fair bit of that time was spent getting used to the software, so one more session next week should do it.
Friday, October 20th, 2006
First post for a while - been extremely busy with other stuff (which is of course not affecting my college work at all). Nah seriously we’ve only just been given out the first assignment, but i’ll get to that soon.
Let me start by saying that Music Theory is the least logical and least theoretical theory i’ve ever come across. Clearly not invented by a mathematician or anyone with any notion of simplicity. That said, I don’t find it that difficult and it will just require a bit of parrot-fashion study come exam time, but as someone with quite a technical and logical mind, it’s frustrating to see how over-complicated they’ve made it. Whoever ‘they’ may be!
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006
Well we just had our first exam, 50 questions multiple choice - piece of the proverbial baked goods. That’s not to say I couldn’t have done better, tons of questions on the human ear, which I wasn’t expecting! Enough tricky questions to teach us to keep on top of the lecture material - next exam in 6 weeks!
Monday, October 2nd, 2006
We got given our first practical assignment tonight - looks pretty straightforward. An audio file with a woman talking (like a radio ad), but there are some mistakes, bits of silence, bits that are too loud. We need to edit it to make it sound smooth and professional. Should be fun!
