BA Hons Sound Arts Y1-
Covid heavily impacted my introduction to BA Sound Arts. We began the year in person, I believe we had approximately three opportunities to meet each other as a class before being transitioned to a solely online education. I appreciate the difficulties everyone faced during that time, I’m only speaking on my experience as a student and how these circumstances shaped my further education and work.
The majority of my first year of BA was experienced from my bedroom, luckily due to my previously established interest in music production I had a more than adequate workspace. My initial impressions gained over zoom was that this course was going to follow a similar funnelling type route to the foundation degree. I remember feeling that the tutors were painting extremely broad strokes of academia, exposing us to as much of the fine art sound arts cannon as possible. Although this later provided useful as deeper investigations into my interests led me back to some of the names mentioned, at the time I did feel that it soon became tiresome. After I had found my interest (visually influenced sound art focused on material) I felt as though most of my academic year was spent writing about areas of sound art I didn’t care for. In retrospect, I realise that this is exactly what a first year is for, this was a method to expand areas of interest to then be later refined. However this feeling of time and effort being spent unwisely was a common theme that lasted until very late in third year.
I think that the most impactful feature of a Covid influenced first year was the lack of collaboration, and perhaps the lack of forming common interests. Being unable to work with or talk with your classmates properly meant that when we eventually came to meet in person, maybe we hadn’t developed the ability to collaborate easily, or even the want to. I think that through continuous isolated working, I had been set in my ways, and had later found it difficult to relinquish complete control of a project.
One of the most vivid memories of my time in first year was the collaboration project, I remember it being a disaster. We were tasked with creating a collaborative sound piece between approx 7 people, which would be played on a radio station. I understand that a lockdown is unusual circumstance, but organising a collaboration of this scale under these circumstances was ridiculous. We also hadn’t been given a proper briefing of the creative licence afforded to us, which resulted in a last minute rush to censor a huge amount of expletives. Granted, perhaps this is something we should have thought of but I would like to think that a tutor might review the work of their students before the hand in. The one positive result I can take from this experience is that it provided me with experience of how to deal with difficult clients.
I have found it slightly difficult to reflect on this time, firstly because the lockdown obscured the perception of time, secondly because the year was mostly spent absorbing knowledge. I think of myself as more of a practical learner so this was not the most engaging time. Useful and necessary, but not engaging.