An overview of what I hope to accomplish this summer.
Give it up for day 38 of the summer academic recess! This is my first summer where I don't have an internship or assistantship lined up, leaving me somewhat understimulated. (And the part-time cashier job I have does little to boost my morale.) Since I have all of this time to spend on anything I want, I figured it would help to try and plan things out rather than chaotically spiral into the infinite.
One way I can start out is by taking some cues from the world of teaching: What are the Learning Outcomes I want from this self-directed study?
- Music SLOs
- Express musical ideas more efficiently.
- Employ stylistic conventions of different music genres.
- Drawing SLOs
- Contextualize drawing as a projection from 3d to a 2d plane.
- Explore shading and lightness values.
- Programming SLOs
- Solve real-world problems.
- Linguistics SLOs
- Prepare for Master's Comprehensive Examination.
From these Learning Outcomes, I have pieced together a few projects I can work on this summer.
Overarching Projects
1. One-hundred Days of Improvement
This project is designed to inspire fearless experimentation. The goal for each day is to make a quick drawing and a quick musical fragment which vaguely connect with each other, due at the end of the day. I want to keep that deadline non-negotiable, but in a low-stress way. Going over deadlines and creating a backlog of work sounds horrific. If I'm not feeling it on a given day, then I'll treat it like an Any% speedrun. Grey canvas with a lopsided, unshaded, wireframe cube and a 1 second recording of an A#m7 square-wave chord. Minimum viable product achieved!
Music Rationale and Expectations
I have so many musical ideas living in my brain, but I struggle with getting them out. My current process involves singing the ideas to myself while painfully transcribing it via MuseScore's clunky interface. Then, taking the MuseScore staff and transcribing it again into MML to play on my MSX synth. That's horribly inefficient. My goal with this rapid music writing experiment is to learn MML so that I can transcribe directly from my brain into my synthesizer, cutting out the intermediary steps.
One aspect of music I am interested in exploring is drums/percussion. I just presumed that myself on piano was sufficient for covering any rhythm-y things for my own musical purposes. As I have learned, that's not quite enough. So, seeing what sort of rhythmic things I can do with my synth could be fun to explore this summer!
Finally, musical genres. What are they? I will admit that the number of genres I am familiar with is low. I should really branch out. So, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
Drawing Rationale and Expectations
I'm pretty "okay" at 2d pixel art, can make passable attempts at drawing cartoon humans (with plenty of references to work from), and can draw things isometrically without the proportions of things being too off. Perspective drawing is somewhat elusive to me. How do you handle diagonals and curves? I'm hoping that I'll be able to intuit those and more through forcing myself to make drawings of 3d objects this summer.
Shading pairs nicely with 3d objects, seeing as it's that extra flair thrown on top of a wireframe to further emphasize the 3d effect.
2. Perspective Projection SVG Renderer
If perspective remains elusive, then I guess I'll have to reference my way out of having to do it. And what better reference is there than one you can generate yourself? And why bother learning the monolith that is Blender, if you can just invent your own CAD-like language for quickly creating 3d objects? That is exactly what I'm going to do with this project.
I like the idea of rendering out to SVG over raster because it would allow me to scale my references and not worry about lines becoming too small or too pixelated. This also theoretically would allow me to mix hand drawn 2d vector drawings with these projected 3d objects for a multimedia approach to getting the art that I crave.
However, building a renderer or projector from scratch involves a huge amount of math and identifying important computer graphics algorithms. Layering, overlapping, intersections, normals - that seems like it'll be a bit of a challenge to do all on my own. I'm confident that I can at least get a wirefrme minimum viable product, though.
Either way, I'll be ending this summer with a way to present 3d objects in a 2d plane!
3. MML Transpiler and Language Extensions
MML has a variety of dialects which are somewhat intelligible, but differ when it comes to more advanced functionality. My synth uses the MuSICA dialect of MML, while on my laptop I have software which uses the 3MLE dialect of MML. The goal with this project is to unify the two through a third dialect that is either intelligible with both or can be transpiled into the two. I don't expect to get too fancy with this. 3MLE already has a pianoroll visualizer - so even if I'm only composing for my synth, I would be able to export it to 3MLE for visual inspection if I wanted to see the pianoroll.
I see this project as being a lot less involved than project #2. I just have to document both dialects, figure out how I want to represent areas where the dialects differ, and convert between the three. Complicated math probably not required.
What about linguistics?
Studying for the Master's Comprehensive Exam isn't going to be a "fun" ordeal, so I haven't bothered trying to turn it into a project. I just need to sit down and read the assigned readings.
Conclusion
There are 58 days left in the summer. That isn't a lot of time, but it's the time I have before I start Fall classes. Have as good of a Summer as you can, and I'll see you in my post-summer reflection, if not earlier!