Yesterday I had my first meeting with Jose, my tutor for the portfolio unit. I found this meeting to be incredibly useful as he helped me think about themes I could aim to tackle with my work, including ones I hadn’t considered before. I need to consider how my work fits into the wider context around which it is produced, and to do this I should consider themes and subjects that are being used by other sound artists so I can do some academic reading that helps me think about the message I want to convey with my work. Although I am interested in creating a piece either about para-social relationships or conspiracy theories, these aren’t commonly talked about topics within sound arts discourse and I should do some more research into other areas of interested to help enhance my piece overall.
Jose suggested I may want to do some research into storytelling through sound art based on what I told him about my “hall of fame”. I have found an article online called ‘The sound machine: a study in storytelling through sound design’ by Mariana J. Lopez and Sandra Pauletto from the University of York (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1859799.1859808) which I will read over the coming days to see if I can find any examples of work I could take inspiration from and also just to further my knowledge around the subject in general. It may also be useful to see if I could link the theme of memory through sound to my piece, as this is also a subject there has been quite a large amount of writing around.
In the meeting, Jose also went through the brief with me and explained what I need to do for each element of the hand-in. It was useful to go through this in more detail, especially in terms of the presentation I am going to have to give about my prototype portfolio project – I know now more about what I will be assessed on, and what I should mention and prepare for in my presentation. These are things like the visiting practitioner lecture series, and the academic reading I have been doing around my chosen areas of interest. I’m happy we went through this, as academic reading is something I have always found challenging due to my ADHD – now I know I do have to place some focus on it and I have a large enough amount of time to do it.