The first phase of the project, currently underway, involves several distinct
tasks. First, preparatory work has been done similar in many ways to the
preparation one would do for ethnographic fieldwork. This preparatory
fieldwork involved familiarization with studio personnel and the rhythms
and culture of the studio environment through interviews, documentation of
artifacts and physical characteristics of the workplace, both passive and
participant observation, and education in the complex technical
areas involved, such as comparative study of synthesizer and sampler
architectures, digital audio processing and multi-track recording technology.
It has been important to develop the project concept in collaboration with
members of the Real World community as a whole. This collaborative design
approach helps create a sense of ownership on the part of eventual users of
the system that is vital to its adoption.
Partly in keeping with this collaborative notion, and partly to get something
practical done as a first step, short-term development tasks were identified
to provide some immediate benefits to the studio while examining in more depth
some of the larger issues involved. This short-term work has had three main
facets: 1) definition and implementation of a relational database system for
tracking synthesizer patches and samples from the various pieces of hardware
in the studio; 2) inventory and data collection, logging the actual sound
materials themselves; and 3) initial domain modelling: documenting the
existing, ad hoc classification system; analyzing, re-clustering and
consolidating existing categories; and finding intuitive representations for
these revised categories and their inter-relationships.