Blog

I won’t deny it, this could be an exceptionally tedious blog post!

But for the purposes of academic completeness, I thought it necessary to record the collection tools and processes that I have decided to use.

Public Collection Tools

This Blog – This is really my main public collection tool. Obviously what goes on this blog will be a bit more readable (and likely more conversational) than what I’m collecting privately, as I don’t want you to bore you to death.

But more to the point, posting on a blog does at least help provide the possibility to share and develop ideas using a standard, freely-available blogging platform (I use WordPress, hosted on my personal Bluehost account). This fits well with the HEFCE definition of research (which you can read in the RH column of my main research page).

Twitter - I post to http://www.twitter.com/simonhj but the vast majority of those tweets are not directly related to my research. Some of them are.

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For all public collection tools, I’ll need to address the issue of academic integrity, not least because I am using certain channels (most notably the ones above) for multiple types of communication, including not just my research but also for communicating my work across all music projects that I’m involved with.

Private Collection Tools

For a start, the Digital Voice Recorder, as pictured above. I picked this up at the airport on the way to the Samsung project (see first case study). It’s a very quick and easy way of recording an event (such as a rehearsal) or an interview which I need to be able to refer to in the future, even if I don’t need a particularly high fidelity recording. The dictaphone itself has a USB jack that slides out of the bottom of it, enabling me to simply push it straight into a laptop, and cut and paste the files using a standard PC computer. This is an exceptionally quick process, which makes it far, far more realistic to attempt to keep a record of large swathes of audio data than if the process were less manageable.

Dropbox – Where am I dragging those files? Into a Dropbox. It’s a single shared folder for all of my digital files, that updates each device I use in real time, as I make changes to those files. My data is always accessible (online or offline), there are multiple backups, and I can share it with stakeholders in my research (such as my supervisors) wherever and whenever it is needed.

iPhone 4 – I use this primarily to record music and video in situations where a high fidelity (i.e. commercial standard) recording is not required, but something more than the Digital Voice Recorder is necessary. Good examples of this are concerts and performances which need tracking for reference purposes but will not be used for anything other than perhaps an informal online video. I suspect the iPad may eventually take over the role of the iPhone in this regard (not least because I need the iPhone to be free to receive phone calls… )

iPad – I’m not yet using one of these, but my intention is to begin using an iPad 2 at some point during 2011. I expect that this will have a disruptive (positive?) effect on my workflow as I don’t currently use a tablet computer, so haven’t yet adapted my working practices around the new types of workflow that are possible with a tablet. I did test a Samsung Galaxy Tab for a couple of weeks as part of my first case study project, but it wasn’t for me, as the ease of use and the time needed to get past the learning curve didn’t fit the amount of time I had to spend with the device (at time of writing (March 2011), I find the Apple software to be much more intuitive to use).

Email – I have found Gmail to be remarkably reliable, and one of my favourite games is ‘subject line bingo’ – trying to remember what I would have written in an email in order to track it down, so that I can reference a fact. I’m taking an altogether more organised approach with my informal research notes, yet I’m still using the same system: drafted or sent-to-myself emails which are tagged [RAM-R] and have as many words in the subject line as I think are relevant tags for the content of the notes. The thinking is that I can find facts far more easily if I have made an active effort to store then tag them in an instantly-retrievable email, than if I had spent hours filing notes which need to be sorted through at the point of recall.

Alternatively, I can bring up an entire list of my informal Research notes in one go just by typing in the ‘RAM-R’ tag into my email. Right now, this seems sensible, but whether it works in practice, only time will tell. There are also issues that need to be understood regarding the backing up of material, which I will address in a later post.

Notebook – I valiantly (or, as the rest of my department will probably say, naively ) declared in my first week as a PhD student that I’d manage my entire PhD through an iPhone and a Blog. Over the following weeks, my supervisors valiantly pitched back at me the reliability of pencil and paper. That itself didn’t convince me of analogue supremacy, however the social necessity to be seen to be taking notes (or the practical necessity of needing a mode of data collection in environments where recording is impractical or unacceptable) did. So, as my collection-tool-of-last-resort, I am pleased to welcome a Moleskine Notebook into my armoury.

I’m not including my PC Laptop here because, like my violin, it is not – for me – a data collection tool. Of course, my violin, and possibly to an extent my computer, are in themselves far more important than any of the other tools listed here. But they are about creative expression and production rather than collection. There’s a profound difference.

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You’ll notice an emphasis on digital collection tools here. That’s not a coincidence; after all, this is an exploration into the relationship between music and technology! But with that comes a distinct set of concerns about the security of purely digital data. But that’s a subject for another post.

One thing I really didn’t understand when I started working on my PhD was the need to collect data that might never be used.

Most of my other projects demand succinctness ; less is more, and verbosity is punished.

So when I was instructed to collect as much data as I possibly could, albeit broken down into different case studies, I wasn’t convinced that it was a very good idea.

The aim, explained my supervisors, was to gather as much as possible, organise it well, and make sure it is easily accessible for future reference. However, plenty of it I might never need to see again. Indeed, some data about musicians may, for privacy reasons, be confidential, and therefore only for my personal reference.

After a few months though, I came to see how a vast pool of info would in fact become useful when I needed to track down a thought.

Something seemingly insignificant at the time of its occurrance – such as a musician’s reaction to a particular event, or a throwaway comment about a person’s action – could pop up in my mind many months later as a vital clue, which would in turn lead to a breakthrough in a greater problem.

And so, I started to carefully collect and organise data about what was happening in the projects I was tracking.

Someone said to me yesterday, "It is a given of any research project that you know your limitations, attempt to discuss and define them, and zoom in on the sense in which what you are doing might be helpful".

A large part of the challenge seems to be how to break down and organize ideas and discuss/communicate them in a way that makes sense.

I think the main priority for the next couple of weeks is to actually construct a framework in which all of this – the technology-music relationship – can be discussed meaningfully…

OK, so here's an initial shortlist of 'disruptive technologies' that I think have affected how we create and consume music in a really big way…

travel
musical instrument construction
the phonograph / recording
air travel
concert halls and acoustics
radio
television
the Walkman
computers
the Internet
smartphones
social media

What have I left out?

Obviously, to properly understand or explore any single one of these technologies would be a lifetime's work, so for that reason I'll be examining everything through the prism of my own perspective: the violin.

I'm hoping this self-limiting framework will actually be a big benefit, as the major problems of a research project like this are a) knowing when to stop, and b) finding a vocabulary through which to express your findings.

Working from a violinistic perspective certainly gives me the latter, and I'm hoping that it will be helpful in finding the former, by asking simply: is this relevant to me as a practicing musician?

The result will doubtless be highly idiosyncratic, but I hope that won't make it any less valuable for people coming from a different perspective. if there are insights that emerge, it's quite possible that they will translate easily to other disciplines.

Or maybe not. We shall see…