WEEK 1: 1/13-1/17

A new team, a new semester, a new project. Same old striving for excellence. We began by getting the obvious out of the way; who are we and what are we good at? Having put up our skill sets, we settled on roles for the project. They are:

• Christina: Music Producer
• Nayoung: Lead Artist
• Victor: Tech Artist
• Wei: Programmer
• Michael: Programmer
• Himanshu: Producer/Programmer

We then took care of housekeeping and formalizing our schedules around our electives and such. We had a small informal meeting with our advisors as to what was expected of us and what the deliverable was supposed to be. We deemed it best to get this answer from the horse’s mouth and decided to set up a client meeting as soon as possible.

We took some time out to come up with our team name. We played around with various portmanteaus of music and light terms such as ‘Treble Makers’, ‘ See Sharp’, ‘Mathemusique’, ‘Euphonia’ and one of our most ambitious names – ‘Ambient Tessellation’! We eventually decided on something much simpler and something we hope will have quicker recall value, while also describing what we’re doing – ‘Graphic Tone’.

On Wednesday, we met our client, Dr. Marilyn Taft Thomas of the CMU School of Music. We had a very productive meeting with her, getting to know better what her objective was with this project. We had a few questions of our own, which were answered and gave us a clearer idea of our deliverable. Dr. Thomas was very open to suggestions and expressed great enthusiasm for the work ahead.

With this new knowledge, we spent the rest of the week brainstorming our initial batch of ideas. We first discussed what the core objective of our system was going to be, based on Dr. Thomas’ explanation, and came up with a rough graph to plot our plethora of ideas against.

We rounded up the week by classifying our ideas into three main categories. We will be presenting these ideas to Dr. Thomas on Tuesday, January 21, 2014.