Jasmine Jones

21 November 2021

MUSIC 256A

Reading Response #9

This week’s reading assignment was a little different than usual, given we’ve finished reading Artful Design and also had the opportunity to watch a video and reflect on it. Allison’s lecture was extremely interesting, as it started with a concept that might be difficult to wrap our heads around at first glance, but managed to come together well and make sense. The concept that we could abstract words into “waveforms”, and then apply signal processing techniques on these waveforms in order to achieve varied results seemed quite ridiculous at first, but made sense as the lecture went on. While watching this lecture, I was reminded of one of the core components of this class. We are always encouraged to push our projects to extremes, pushing the limits of aesthetics, design, and general functionality ideas. These projects did not have to have real “purposes” either; they could be toys for play or narratives for storytelling as much as they could educational or used as a tool to make an existing process easier.

At a first glance there’s no real purpose of the vectorization of words. Does that mean we should do away with it? Like we’ve previously discussed, although it’s nice to design and create a product as a means-to-an-end, some of the most artful and maybe even sublime designs prove to be ends-in-themselves. Whether someone uses the techniques Allison describes to simply play around with different data sets, training, and methods, or to abstract a certain data set for a purpose, they are equally as valuable. The methods outlined in the lecture were used to compose poetry, which can be qualified as an end-in-itself. Instead of creating poetry through conventional means, like typing or writing by hand, these methods add another dimension that wholly contributes to the experience of writing poetry, as well as how it’s received. I believe this is beautiful in on itself! It opens the door for so many ways of creative expression, ways that we might not imagine immediately, but ways that are equally valuable.

Watching the lecture made me think about how I could incorporate exploring illogical extremes not only for the class projects in this course, but also in the projects that I create outside of this course in the future. Like I stated at the beginning of the course, I come from an engineering background so it has been somewhat difficult to push myself creatively at times. It’s my first instinct to value functionality over design! As we reach the end of the course, I have been reflecting and have realized that I have grown in this sense, and am still growing! I’ve been pushed to challenge my conception of design in my technical projects, opting for artful design whenever possible. It has been a long process but I’m excited to create my final project to show the culmination of my growth, and end this fall quarter on a high note!