This week, I scheduled my first interview and had the interesting opportunity to reflect on my research this year through my research speech.
Interview
For my first interview, I'll be interviewing Evan Forester, and audio engineer with experience in TV and rap music audio production and processing. I'm optimistic for this interview. His professional experience means he will have great knowledge for modern music as well as atmospheric qualities of music. This will also give me a better sense of direction for music recording as my current knowledge is fairly limited.
Research Speech
For our research speech, we need to reflect on all of our research up until this point and deliver our findings to our class. This helps me in three ways. First, it gives me more public speaking practice. I will need a lot of public speaking practice in life, whether I am just trying to succeed professionally, or if I end up working in music education. Second, it gives me practice delivering my topic to a general audience. I want to make my topic accessible to my audience. I would already have an "in" since everybody is familiar with music to an extent, but due to the specificity of my topic and the specifics of my research project, there will actually create more explaining for the audience. Also, this audience will all have different levels of knowledge with a gray area of understanding that I will need to be receptive to. I plan to use many audio examples layered with in depth explanations to create an engaging and clear speech from the audience's perspective. Third, it has given me a chance to reflect on my research process and progress. I saw how my musical focus shifted from rap, to rock and eventually to indie and soundtrack music. I also reflected on the specifics of some of my general research which will help me keep focus as I continue to work on my original work.
This week came with some progress, but my main takeaway is being able to reflect on my goals, immediate future and where I have come from in this class. I have learned a lot, and I want to make that evident in my final outcome and portfolio I create from this class.