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for this stimulus, we worked on it for 2 weeks, as we really liked the idea and wanted to create the best piece of music we could for the stimulus. The idea came from the fact that I suffer from lucid dreams, in which you are fully conscious during sleeping inside your dreams. the stimulus came from one night where I dreamt I was on a special date with my girlfriend, only to discover it wasn't real and was all just a dream. I then realised after waking up that she was actually right beside me sleeping In bed. it was the mix up and contrast of emotions that made me want to use this as a stimulus, and we worked on developing all of the ideas I put forward. We used a ukulele as the lea instrument in the song, and reverb on the vocals these two choices were to reflect the floaty feeling of being in a dream, but we also used minor chords and sad lyrics to give the contrast of feeling like the dream isn't a nice place to be, like a bittersweet feeling of being with someone you love but knowing its all fake. the ending of the song came to a good resolve, and told the story very close to the stimulus the lyrics showing that everything was right all along and the melody and harmonies becoming major and closing together to show the ending felt right. the strengths were the ukulele and the vocals working together to create a song that seemed to be happy on the outside, but carried more depth and meaning when listened to more attentively. one weakness was that the song may have come across a little bit cheesy, and if we could've written it again I would've added more variation and we could've developed some of the ideas a little more to bring more story and drive to the song.

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QS16 2 Wk9 Room 3 Response to own stimulus

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QS16 2 Wk9 Room 3 Response to own stimulus

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This week Caitlyn showed us all a picture of the eye of a girl, watching her former lover dance with another girl. This became our stimulus as we came up with ideas of heartbreak, betrayal, and losing someone you love to someone else. We developed these ideas using our own experiences with relationships, and this helped to develop real emotion and create strong ideas with deep meaning. We had a drummer for this week, which meant that we could focus more on the melody and creating a bigger, fuller sound for the song. I took on the role of lead guitar, and worked on the melody line. I decided to stay close to the melody of the vocals and work in the same area, and created a solo which mimicked the chorus melody of the vocals. The idea of heartbreak was developed by all of us further to become empowering, as well as sad, to show that the woman is strong and can overcome this, as long as the boy won't break her heart again. I feel as if our performance was a lot stronger this week, and we have started to really improve in lots of aspects, including time management, co operation and our ability to create a quality piece of music. this was the first guitar solo I ever performed and I am pleased with the outcome of it.

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QS16 2 Wk7 Room 3 Response to Own Stimulus

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QS16 2 Wk7 Room 3 Response to Own Stimulus

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This week our stimulus was the TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer. We all enjoyed the show and got thinking about the idea of vampires after chatting about it. We came up with the idea of a vampire asking for forgiveness from their lover, for being a monster inside. We came up with the idea of having a ballad type song, using a slow tempo with a strong vocal line and droning guitar and basslines to show the dark and mysterious side of the vampire, but also show the love and emotion they feel for their partner. I think our strengths were definitely the vocals, as they really connected well with the stimulus and told an emotional story. Our weakness was the instruments not communicating very well, and again my instrument became damaged and so the intonation became inaccurate, leading to off tune work.

https://youtu.be/uamcI-Rn5Hg

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This week, we were given a video to watch as our stimulus. It was a video of something called "Rainbow Brite" and featured lots of happy children, horses, rainbows and an evil witch. the video ws animated and looked a lot like a children's cartoon. The ideas that we had started off as trying to create a happy piece full of color and major tones, but we decided to turn the stimulus on its head by focusing on the main antagonist of the video, the witch. She was dressed in all black, and was very different to the happy rainbow children, channeling lightning instead. We wanted to reflect that in the music we made, by using minor chords instead, distortion and lyrics that were a dark and about being more devoid of color, rather than full of it. I feel like the ideas we had were very strong and we managed to develop them into a great idea. However, performance wise we were unable to communicate together what we would like to play, we had issues with our equipment and instruments, and we struggled to organise ourselves to fit the time we had in the studio, and ran out quickly.

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QS16 2 Wk4 Response to moving image Room 4

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QS16 2 Wk4 Response to moving image Room 4

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We were given an article about a young refugee girl, whos father was killed as a stimulus. We came with ideas directly about the stimulus, for example my ideas were about how quickly things can change, just like how the young girl's father suddenly died. We used lots of reverb on the voice to give it a haunting and lonely feel, and to symbolise the melancholy and ghostly presence in the song. We used acoustic guitar and piano to provide a light accompaniment along with a bass guitar to make the vocals the lead part in the song with a more prominent role. This was to make the emotional vocals have a bigger impact. I feel as if your vocals were the strong point, but the chords were a problem. this is because we had too many chords in our verse and the progression wasn't communicated very well in the group. My guitar was also damaged at the time, meaning the intonation was incorrect, so the sound wasn't perfectly in tune.

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We were given a storyboard to use as a stimulus for songwriting. My ideas were about someone trying to spy on the woman but doing such a bad job and using completely the wrong tool for the job. I also thought about this idea as an analogy for an unrequited love, e.g someone who tries so hard to get the woman to notice him but fails miserably. I decided to use "The world's worst secret agent" and use that as my analogy. In the group we decided to go with a different idea, because another member had a stronger idea and we really liked the key it was in, so we decided to work with that instead. Their idea was based on the emotion of fear, reflected by the emotions on the girls face in the storyboard. We developed the ideas by using lyrics to give the feeling of fear and despair and the instruments used a building up effect to show the build up of emotions and paranoia the girl was feeling. In our Performance, we used the sounds on the drum machine to simulate the sound of a car engine starting up, to show the idea of the car being followed in the storyboard. The feedback from the group was that our ideas and my guitar riff sounded good, and they fit in well to the stimulus. however, they would've liked more lyrics to be written and the vocals to be louder. they also wanted my role in the piece to be more prominent, as my main riff was only played at the start of the song. I feel like the song we wrote could've been a decent song if we sent more time on the melody and lyrics for vocals, and made both of the guitars take a prominent role in the song. our strengths were the instruments, solos and riffs and the weakness was the vocal line and lyrics as we only had a line or two.

Performance: https://youtu.be/eo-htUGjuFw