Reflections 02.02.16

Why does saying your ideas aloud help to clarify them? It’s such an odd experience. Something in the process from brain to mouth allows you to almost instantly focus parts, or more to the point, highlight glaring holes in your ideas. In being so caught up in the initial idea to explore sound, we had not considered the demography of our participants, how the location would dictate the type of participants we would get and how that would then affect the data we collected. This came as almost a disappointing blow initially. We had invested a lot of time in planning and organising the initial idea of sounds and movement exploration that we had not unpicked some of the specifics. I guess we knew that we would have to drill down to the core of our idea eventually, but had been postponing committing to it until we had had the approval of staff.

A paper by Colin MacLeod, Nigel Gopie, Kathleen Hourihan, Karen Neary, and Jason Ozubko in the May, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. In this paper, these researchers document what they call the production effect. They looked at people's memory for items like a list of words. They found that if people studied the list by reading half of the words silently and the other half by saying the words out loud, that he words spoken aloud were remembered much better than those that were read silently.

The production effect works because it makes part of the list of items more distinctive. The words you speak aloud are now translated into speech and you have knowledge of producing the items as well as a memory of hearing them. All of this information makes your memory for the spoken items more distinct from the rest of the items that were read silently.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201005/say-it-loud-i-m-creating-distinctive-memory

‘Overambitious’

This was a total knock to my confidence. The whole point of studying an MA for me, was to push the boundaries of my own ability. I wanted this collaboration module to push me so far out of my comfort zone that I could truly see the nature of my own practice, evaluate my own skills set and become a multidisciplinarian.  Whether this will happen eventually or not, does not matter. I need to leave myself vulnerable to failure to learn. This plus side is that I’m so stubborn that this only forces me to succeed.

After comprehensive feedback from the group we have lots of interesting research starting points. We have given ourselves a week to fully decipher the intentions of our project, and its direction. What sounds will we use? What do they represent? Hopefully more comprehensive research into sound installation artists and sensory deprivation studies will help focus the specifics of our idea.

On a personal level, I know that I need to research and then digest information before I can fully evaluate its suitability and relevance. I have to go for a bike ride, do a painting or do something mindless to let my brain engage with the information.  

I’m getting itchy feet. So far the core of this project is research and organisational. What do we need to do? When does it need to happen by? Where are we going to do it? What are we going to use? There are so many questions and almost no action. Normally I would start painting, or making visuals to help me get through this stage of the project, but with this one I can’t/shouldn’t/there’s no point? I can’t wait to make the poster and the flyers just to subdue my creative itch.

Also there’s a lot of waiting, waiting to hear back from people, waiting for approval, waiting for a space, waiting for a decision. This is difficult because I am impatient. I need to drive my energy into research to help manage this time drift.