Hello! This is Jooyoung Kim, an audio engineer and music producer.
I’ve been working on so many projects lately that I haven’t been able to post any articles to this blog. Some of them are currently in progress, so I’m just writing a simple life update today.
Let’s start!
Two weeks ago, I participated in a modular synthesizer seminar as a lecturer. I was already familiar with the principles of sound synthesis, and I own a semi-modular synth and a vocoder. However, it was my first time dealing with a full modular synthesizer (Eurorack standard). So, when I was preparing the seminar materials, I studied quite hard. Of course, it takes long time.
The organizer said they would send me some photos from the event, but I haven’t received them yet. Once they arrive, I’ll share the full story in more detail.
At the same time, I received a minor revision decision on my paper from the Audio Engineering Society. I was very grateful for the decision, but unfortunately, I also caught a bad cold. Because the reviewers suggested adding some simple measurements, I pushed myself to complete them, which made my cold even worse. I ended up having to lead the modular synth seminar while feeling quite ill.
Building the audio hardware—which I designed entirely from scratch—is now almost finished. Twisting all those wires and soldering the power lines was exhausting, but it has been quite rewarding. Now, I just need to solder the switches and potentiometers, and I’ll be all done. I’m really looking forward to it.
I also submitted my new research on deep learning related to audio hardware. I’ve been preparing this paper since last May, so it has been a year-long process. Personally, I don’t feel the experimental results were groundbreaking, but I submitted it anyway in hopes that it might be helpful to other researchers. I really hope it gets accepted!
I was selected for the ‘RE:SEARCH’ grant program by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, so I’ll be receiving some research funding. Since my proposed study includes listening tests, I’ve been busy designing the experiments, preparing documents for IRB approval, and conducting a literature review for the paper. These tasks are quite time-consuming, so I’ve been spending most of my time lately wrestling with all this writing.
The research funding will be released in May, which is also when the budget execution begins. Since the actual IRB review takes place in June, I have to submit all my documents by the end of May. The final approval usually doesn’t come out until early July, so I need to finalize the experiment design and paperwork very quickly. I think I’m going to have quite a headache dealing with all of this over the coming week.
With all these tasks piling up, I haven’t had a spare moment to focus on this blog. Once things start to wrap up—whether it’s finishing the hardware, getting my paper published, or receiving the photos from the modular synth seminar—I’ll make sure to post about them one by one.
Until then, I’ll see you in the next post!
Jooyoung's Music Blog 