FINAL WRITTEN REFLECTION

I learned that there’s a surprising amount of research publications by Microsoft, and they are indeed releasing Project Acoustics for free for us all to use. There’s Spat5 from Icram which is also free. I wouldn’t be able to make my project what it is without them, for me, it’s like an “I’m standing on the shoulders of others” moment. To be able to read Microsoft’s papers and see how everything works and see their progress step by step over the years culminating in the weird quirky way Project Acoustics works is truly fascinating, even though I’m only able to understand half of it on a superficial level.
I also learned that it’s not that I’m too stupid to learn anything, it’s more of a matter of if I have the patience for it. If I’m truly interested in it, I can grind at it for hours until I reach the bottom of the rabbit hole. So the usual “Aww I’m too dumb for this stuff” becomes “Am I really interested in this” and “Fuc Okay so wait a minute what exactly is going on?” The hard part is not the intake of information, it’s trying to figure out exactly what I don’t know. Learning is really hard especially at first when I don’t even know what I don’t know. But once the right question becomes obvious, I can Google it, one after the other, like dominos.
With this, I was able to learn stuff that the project requires on the fly, without the motivation penalty from self-pity or self-doubt. I was even able to conquer writing programming scripts in Unity for the lighting controls, which was faster progress than I expected. I thought writing code on my own is still a faraway fantasy but apparently no, I’m doing it right now.
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I didn’t really consult with mentors apart from getting support for pre-MIM from Allen Sir, he encouraged me to go on with the Max/MSP patch for the lighting and visual design, which the lighting and audio ideas slowly morphed into this project. I am grateful that he’s willing to allow me to do this experimental stuff for pre-MIM.
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The original goal was to share the greatness of orchestral music with everyone, but now that the project has taken a different turn I guess the goal becomes just sharing with other people what I find passionate about and what I have done. Of course, I still live orchestral music, that’s why the music of choice and the style and atmosphere is still orchestral, but I now realise that this project is more for me as an excuse to pursue my interests more than anything else. I realise now that I’m not actually useless at programming anymore and I could probably do more exploring in Unity and can actually have a hope of becoming a game designer that happens to also arrange orchestral music from time to time.