Attempting to zero-in on a topic for my impending audio paper has been an arduous task fraught with the echoes of future mid life crises – what am I even interested in? Is there anything that I stand for? What are my politics? Questions like these have chased themselves around my mind with a furious sense of hustle and bustle, but I did make some slight progress, detailed below.

I was musing on the nature of audio papers and in what scenarios an audio paper would suit better than a traditional (written) essay, and I felt that (, personally) dialogue was the most compelling argument for the usage of an audio paper. Consider the following; if you require sound effects or examples of archival audio, you could attach audio files to your written paper to be referred to at certain points within the text. The very nature of these audio ‘examples’ is to interrupt the text, to be focused on between moments of speech. However, conversation and the interactivity of the voice is something that cannot be faithfully simulated within a written body of text. Conversations constantly overlap, people cut off others’ sentences and interrupt, fight for their point to be heard and generally abuse the absurd notion that one line of text comes after the previous line; this is the flagrant lie that is sold to us by transcriptions of conversation.

Of course, I recognise that I’m overlooking many excellent and inspired techniques that could be utilised to brilliant effect in an audio paper context, but I am over-simplifying the matter so as to out-wit this option paralysis that I seem to be plagued with. I find that deceiving ones own mind in this manner proves to be a strong technique in combating mental freezes and erroneous blips in cognitive processing.

So; I have ascertained that conversational interaction will be dear to the heart of my audio paper. However it soon dawned on me that despite this sizeable revelation, I was still no closer to an actual definable topic, and even further away from some sort of conclusion.

In my one-on-one tutorial with Ingrid, she shed some light on the predicament and lent me a nugget of wisdom in the form of (and I paraphrase) ‘you seem to be thinking very introspectively’. This hit home. I was too bogged down in the personal, artistic side of things that I had completely negated to think academically, critically, questioningly (well perhaps I was thinking questioningly enough…). She asked what I was interested in (which set me off again on a whole series of crises, see paragraph 1 for more details) and with some difficulty I brought it back to the basics: surreal absurdism in everyday life, conversational peculiarity, and perhaps a dash of post punk (I’m currently invested in the London post punk scene, closely following it with the excitement of a bloodhound who has just caught smell of a large pile of herring circa. 1982, see fig 1. for more details on herring capture rates in the past 60 years).

Tying these together has been a real tough nut to crack. More specifically, what is the question that I am chasing? What is the topic that I am inquiring into, or documenting? I will be doing some more heavy thinking with less of a focus on self contained brooding, and will hopefully have something to show for it (a 200 word abstract is what Ingrid is pushing for) by next week.