State of my Thesis.

I haven't posted in my blog in over a month, which really isn't a good thing; it kind of reflects my personal blog posting habits, which tends to happen very, very sporadically; it isn't unusual for me to not post on my blog for months at a time and then come out with five blog posts in the course of two days.
Admittedly, I haven't been particularly chuffed about this thing, so far; while I do love things like speech synthesis and linguistics, I don't find it to be an interesting art piece. Much of my favorite art is irreverant, absurd, ephemeral, pretentiously mysterious and nebulous or deliberately simplistic and minimal. I want to make something along these lines, but I feel like everything's being pushed further into the realm of pragmatism. I feel like anything I suggest to focus the project is pegged as being "too all-over-the-place", no matter what I say, even when it seems as though I'm making a simple, concise suggestion.

So far, this class has just made me feel really nervous and self-conscious. I like criticism; It's just really difficult for me to handle it coming from five different sides and actually respond verbally. My flaw is probably that I can sometimes think that a single bit of criticism means that the entire project is a failure, and having that come from all over the place makes me really nervous. I think if this class was taught via AIM or e-mail--allowing me to just think about the bits of criticism for a few minutes-- I could probably do really well. =D

Throughout all my changes, I have focused on one single concept--music conversion--but I've never been able to stick with a single idea. I think aloud; I switch from one thing to the next constantly until I settle on something. The idea of a thesis is really cool, but it's difficult for me to make one, as I'm a perpetually indecisive person. I can literally spend two hours trying to decide upon what I'm going to eat at a given time.


Anyway, with all this in mind, I've basically scrapped all traces of objectivity from this thing. As a precursor to my final thesis(which will hopefully have more of the things that I stated above), I plan on focusing entirely on how language is interpreted digitally. I'm going to be using ASCII values for frequencies and a built-in text-to-speech synthesizer as a source for waveforms and envelopes, with the volume of the speech synth itself providing the envelope for the musical sound. I will be typing out the sounds in realtime, with an objective for performance being a conversation with the text itself. The text will be displayed on a projection, and my final presentation will either be a playback or a performance. I would really like to perform it for the class, but I think I might need to convince Rees about that. =D