So in light of the fact I have no decided which path I am going to follow, I feel it's important for me to shed some light on why I am choosing to do what I am doing and what benefit I feel can be gained from this.
I would say it is fairly obvious that anyone on this course is interested in audio and music; we wouldn't be here otherwise. However, we all have different motivations in being here, different paths that we want to follow afterwards.
In understanding the path I want to follow afterwards, it's important to understand the one I have been walking on upto this point. Through school I played the Piano lightly, the Tuba to grade 4 (weird, I know) and tried my hand at most others. However as with most kids of my age at that time, computer games were becoming more and more prevelant in my life, not to mention the push at my school to do sports and my love of Tennis. Though both my Grandparents are concert grade Pianists, neither of my parents play anything, despite loving music itself. So the intent I had to learn an instrument was easily ignored for addictive games and other than the occasional "How is your Piano practise coming along?" from my Grandparents, there really wasn't much push to keep it up from anywhere else.
Fast forward 7 or 8 years and school is nearly over, with adolesence well under way. I discover DJing with my friends from School and frankly, all the culture that goes with it. Music is in my family, even if it skipped a generation. When I discovered that you didn't have to "get grades" in order to perform and, in a certain sense, create music, my mind was blown. I was obsessed with DJing and Dance Music in a way I had never been about anything in my life. This was before I had ever even stepped foot in a nightclub...
Needless to say, the deal was sealed on the first clubbing experience. To this day, it is still the clearest image I have of "clubbing" in my mind, the purest it has even been. Now don't get me wrong, I was wasted; some of the grandure could have been imagined. It is a clear image though, even if partially imagined, associated with a feeling that is only describable as love.
Fast forward again to today. Here I am sitting on my computer, in my bedroom. Though I am writing my blog just now, later this evening I will turn to my DAW to start writing electronic dance music. For a while though, I have felt like making music is a sterile process... It is extremely easy to become distracted - surf the web in other words. It certainly feels nothing like a club, regardless how loud I turn it up. A club is all about sensory saturation. It's a mixture of frequencies coming together, both light and audio spectrums, in order to transport you to another place. A place that is a million miles away from where I am sat just now.
So the question is how can you bring the club vibe into the studio situation, in a way that doesn't require everybody to be a lighting engineer/VJ. In the same way that the Subpac (3rd blog post) has brought the club into the studio for the audio spectrum, I am looking to answer the question for the lighting side of the equation. At the Honours presentation, I want people to be le to play their favourite tune in a darkened room, which is reacting to what they put into the system with light. Light that is consistently changing colour in tandem with the musics frequency spectrum, in order to bring a far more imersive experience to the listener.
From a testing standpoint, I want to see if it can be developed to the accuracy required to be useful as a mixing and engineering tool and the most useful implementation of audio reactive lights. By examining the excitment and drive to produce more music, along with their opinions on usefulness as a tool, I should be able to determine whether or not light can become an integral part of the music making experience for producers.
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