The first year of studies was very complicated to finish. On a personal level, I was going through a lot of difficulties. I moved from Madrid to a city where I didn’t know anyone in the middle of a pandemic. Making friends anywhere took work, and interacting with my new classmates was hard. Although English was a language that I mastered at the time, it ended up not being my mother tongue. Going from high-school English to colloquial and sometimes academic English was complicated. However, in terms of execution, I found the first year too easy. In the second year of studies, the difficulty increased.
It started with a subject I was very interested in, which finally led me to investigate topics I was curious and passionate about. Remember that in the year before, my only academic essay was of commendable mockery – I wrote a little text about “chess music”. In the second year, I had the opportunity to write an essay about a subject I had an appreciation for and was curious to know more about. The peculiarity of that essay was its development method – an audio paper. The issue of the essay was Michel Giacometti and Portuguese ethnomusicology. This project led me to later develop my final course essay about the same topic, and with more research, in which I created a piece to talk about later.
As for the execution of the same audio paper, it was a very enriching experience. With this project, I finally gained pleasure in sound art because I could join a complex theme to the sound practice. In the end, I felt fulfilled. My tutor mentioned that my research was meritorious and equivalent to a PhD. Even my colleagues were amazed.
Another relevant project was the collaborative project with the MA VR students. By that time, I was able to have more consistent work in terms of sound for film, and, already in the spirit of a sound artist, I got back that pleasure of editing. With the collaborative project, I had very little joy. I was asked for a vaporwave song. First, I am not a musician; secondly, I did not master any knowledge about producing vaporwave songs. I had fun making the song, but I didn’t find it funny in the big picture of the course. This phase was very parodic.
The last and most relevant project of that year was undoubtedly the research project, where I joined a topic of great importance in the contemporary context of sound studies with sound art practice. It was a project where I took away a lot of information and was undoubtedly what made me fall in love with what I do. That same year I had the opportunity to visit, during vacations, numerous sound art venues such as festivals and events, and I even started to be more selective about my readings. I read many more essays and expanded my area of interest.