This is the first blog for an entire week. (Broken Computer) I will try and summarise!

On Tuesday Carla and I met at the VRU lab to discuss our collaborative project for the first time, after going through a few things about the assessment with Greg we wanted to get a few ideas down so we could make a start. Carla and I were both keen to get started right away as it is quite impossible to predict what direction a project of this sort would go in, and we thought it would be best if we did much experimentation and exploration within the time we had.

Our ideas started from Gregory suggesting we used Google to search a random word and see what came up. I am going to try and make a mind map to represent these ideas next time I am in the VRU lab and post it here to give a clearer picture how our ideas were developed.

Presently I have made the observation that our ideas have developed further since we started thinking about, and experimenting with, the technology. I am interested in reading into projects of a similar kind and how they were developed, mainly for inspiration. Greg suggests in the reading list: Digital Performance by Steve Dixon.

On Wednesday Carla and I met again at the VRU lab to play around with the motion capture suit. Carla had already worked with it previously so I had a go and I think its brilliant!! The information was in MIDI which could be very useful if we use any audio software like Logic. (of which I am almost familiar with)! We intend to use the MIDI data outputted by the suit to control audio samples etc. To program the information we looked at Modul8 software, however, we didn't find it very intuitive to use and its potential lies mostly with visual programming. We then had a chat with Jonathon and Mike who suggested we looked at using the sampler within Logic or Max/MSP. (Max Session with Jonathon today was very useful and I feel there is a lot we could do with Max for this project once we grasp how to use it properly!)

The audio material we want to use would form a new or foreign language, this idea stems from making a Japanese pop song and pop video. As neither of us can speak in Japanese we thought it would be interesting to use a 'language of our own' using words from a story written by Carla about Little Red Riding Hood (we felt that the story tied in morally with our initial Ganguro girls subject (see mind map (ytbp - yet to be posted!)))

On Thursday we met at the studio to record our material. Carla wrote out the story for me and to begin with we chose what words or series of words represented the story or sounded good phonetically and wrote them down to read in the recording. The recording ran rather smoothly and we got four takes of our words and phrases. Once read through normally and secondly with some crazy articulation (highly amusing!) from both of us. The second take was in order to give the future arrangement of the words and phrases more colour and sound more lyrical- like a Japanese pop song!

On Friday Carla and I aimed to edit the audio material into 128 samples. To do this we used Protools to select certain parts of the audio file and bounced down smaller files. We aimed to select the most interesting combinations of words and strange or alien sounding phonetics from the material. We even reversed a few phrases to create new words. We intend to use these samples as the lyrics for our Japanese pop song, the suit I mentioned towards the beginning of this post would control what order the samples are played - which we will aim to set up on monday. I think it would also be interesting to be able to control the speed of which the samples are played and the rate they were played back, because I can see a few problems if the samples were played back too fast the result wouldn't sound like dialogue. However, I am excited about the resulting sound! Carla expressed an interest in using sounds effects on the audio which could make it even more interesting. I certainly like the idea of being able to mould our samples into something that is likely to be unpredictable because of the nature of the selection from the information produced from the suit. Carla liked the idea of using the movement used to produce the arrangement in a performance that could appear in the video.

As yet we haven't decided whether we want to have a go at composing the backing track for our pop song ourselves or collaboration with someone else. (Carla mentioned she had a friend who might be interested in doing this).