I sat down with my excellent co-supervisor, Per Mårtensson, the other week and got some good and hard questions to answer. It was clear that I wasn’t clear at all about what I’m doing. Finally I saw the missing part in what I was trying to describe: I didn’t see the thing that just was too obvious to myself.
Sometimes when you spend time with experts in a subject, you might forget that it’s your subject as well. In my case I’m teaching Game music, Programming basics, Web Design, Project management at the Royal Music College in Stockholm for years. In companion with my music production expert colleagues Jan-Olof Gullö, Juhani Hemmilä and Hans Gardemar I feel like a web hacker at a music college, but really, my background is music production. I’ve spent so much time producing music with hopeless technology. I’ve tried to make a great vocal track with an old spring-reverb. I’ve discovered the sys-ex code for my Roland MT-32 to turn off the reverb on the bass drum and I’ve lost hours and hours of work when Alesis MMT-8 lost the track data. I was also a part of SourceForce with Mats Liljedahl and Bjarne Nyquist developing the most advanced MIDI-Xtra (Sequence-Xtra) for Macromedia Director and have spent a lot of time developing interactive music pedagogic tools.
Therefor, it’s quite natural that my perspective on what I will explore in my research really is a music producers perspective. It’s not about interactive composition, the function of music in games, music theory or interactive live performance even if a lot will relate to it.
The question is really about something like “how the music production technology for interactive application can be improved to support musical expressions currently not supported”.
well…I know, it wasn’t that definite. I’ll be back. Refining.