Creative Process

Through this course, my skills in idea generation have improved significantly. This is largely due to the focus we placed on “harnessing our creativity,” through many means. I found the best methods placed me in an unfamiliar environment, where I was able to take inspiration from little things that I may have not been exposed to before. Specifically, when trying to figure what kind of music I wanted to create for my demo, I followed suggestions from “Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad,” namely going for a long walk in an unusual place. When I did this, I simply strolled around neighborhoods of College Park that I had never been to before and let inspiration come to me from unusual places. I opted to not listen to any music, rather paying more attention to the color of houses, and how certain combinations created different moods or emotions, noting how these moods might be translated to a soundscape. It really did not take long for the ideas to start flowing, and soon I had more than enough options to experiment with on my instruments to see which ones felt just right. Going on this walk was crucial to my creative process for coming up with my demo track, and taught me valuable techniques in idea generation along the way. Another source of creativity I called upon in this project was through looking at similar projects online. DIY instruments and guitar making can be found all over Youtube and various blogs, and they served as an excellent source of technical inspiration for actually putting the hardware on the instruments, as well as what each measurement should be.