2nd year review

Well...

Having been on the receiving end of almost continuous criticism of my work, in my annual review yesterday, I am now at a bit of a loss as to what to do next.

Although I was expecting a bit of a grilling, I hadn't realised quite how much my proposals would get attacked. Although some of the comments were based upon my having not explained certain things properly (for example stressing that the factors I break creativity down into must be more clearly defined than creativity itself, otherwise how do you measure those factors and what benefit is there for that factor being included?), other comments were far more fundamental, questioning my entire approach.

I've gone from having a very clear idea of what I'm doing and why, and a real focus and motivation, to feeling quite lost again. Now I want to arrange a meeting with my supervisors sooner rather than later, as at this stage I wanted to be really getting on with practical work rather than still questioning what exactly I'm doing.

I guess watch this space?

Journals

Went to a fairly non-eventful research training session today, on scientific writing. Beyond this quite useful wikiversity link on how to write in a scientific way, the only real benefit I got from this (apart from a break from marking!) was to think about what journals I want to be aiming for, for publication.

As my research focus has shifted away from music and towards creativity and evaluation this year, many of the journals I have been used to looking at have become less relevant. So now I've set up some content alerts for some new journals and need to get used to looking at different journals (ideally I want to set aside some time for this each week to browse some journal content).

Here's a list of the journals that are quite relevant for me (along with some journals on music/AI that I prob will still find interesting but not necessarily useful for my current work):

• Creativity Research Journal (impact factor 0.57)
• Lecture notes in AI
• Lecture notes in CS (probably not so relevant anymore really)
  
• Leonardo (and related journals)
  
• Digital Creativity
  
• Cognitive Science (impact factor 2.179)
  
• Topics in Cognitive Science (impact factor 9.389)
  
• Cognitive Science: A multidisciplinary journal
  
• Minds and Machines
  
• Journal of Creative Behaviour (0.429) (we don't get it)
  
• Creativity
  
• Creative Review (not peer reviewed, doesn't look that relevant)
  
• Psychology of aesthetics, creativity and the arts
  
• Evaluation
  
• Evaluation review
  
• Research evaluation
  
  
• AISB quarterly (not really a journal..!)

Music-related journals:

• Journal of New Music Research
  
• Computer Music Journal
  
• Psychology of Music
  
• Music Perception
  
• Musicae Scientae
  
• Journal of interdisciplinary music studies
  
• Journal of music and meaning
• Contemporary music review
  

Sound synthesis articles

As part of some second marking work I was doing for a music technology course, I stumbled across a great set of articles from Sound on Sound, about how sound synthesis works (from the very very basics, onwards)

Having looked through them quickly, I think I'm going to set aside some time to go through these articles properly and make sure my knowledge on this is up to scratch. I guess it's a little off-topic in terms of creativity, but I'm finding that some serious gaps in my knowledge here are causing a bit of a barrier in terms of understanding some of my reading. So this seems like a more successful way to try and plug the gaps rather than ploughing through the massive volume by Curtis Roads, say, on computer music...

floundering under a sea of books

Looking at the pile of books around my desk at the moment, I am finding several that I really haven't gotten around to reading yet, that I have had out on loan from the library or have acquired some other way, for a shameful amount of time. 

Some of these books have been key references for me - Wiggins and Delieges book on musical creativity, Lerdahl and Jackendoff's book A Generative theory of tonal music, various books on creativity or emergence, Bregman's Auditory Scene Analysis - the list goes on and on.

Let's face it - even if I sat down and did nothing else but read the books in my shelves, I still couldn't read all of them properly, page-by-page, and in any case I don't have that luxury with time. 

So a new approach is required - I'm going to train myself to be able to pick and choose content better from these books. I need to be stricter and really focus my attention on my research area of musical creativity. Which means, for example, that the Lerdahl and Jackendoff book is only useful to me (right now) for a small project I'm doing on the crossover between musical creativity and creativity in language use, so I should give it the appropriate level of attention and then return it so other people can read it. 

I've kept very sporadic notes from the reading I have done so far, so as of now I'm going to keep these notes electronically and file them together, otherwise they're impossible to find. I guess this blog would be a good place to do this, so quite a few future posts will be my thoughts and notes from books I've read over the past year and a half as well as future books. In a way this will be good anyway, to review what I have read - I'm sure that 75% at least of this reading has gone out of my head by now...