Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Track and Field 2020

 In my Trends in Modern Sound Design class, we often do an iterative hot-potato project called Track and Field.  It's an opportunity for the students to work on efficiency, conceptualization, and workflow. Here's how it works:


1) On the first day, each student brings in a 30-second piece of audio of their own creation.  The audio can be anything, from field recordings to original music to a short narrative. Students bring in both a rendered audio file and individual stems, and may spend no more than 60 minutes in the studio working on it.
2) Each submission gets passed to another student, then uses the original material as the starting point for their own work. Again, they must limit themselves to 60 minutes of studio time and 30 seconds in duration, but other than that, they can do anything they want. Students turn in both a rendered audio file and individual stems.
3) We repeat that over and over, with a matrix set up in such a way that each student usually gets to work on each thread.

This quarter, I had eleven students, so there are eleven threads.  I've taken each thread and strung each iteration together in sequence, so you can hear how one thread changes as different designers get their hands on the material.  Enjoy! 

(side note: Thread 7 featured some prominent commercial music, so SoundCloud won't let me present it to you.  Your loss!)

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