What can I say? This assignment has been a roller coast with a few downs, but overall, plenty of ups. The last minute factor was certainly a down but came with a number of up with it. During the later stages of our planning we eventually decided to present our topic along the lines of: ‘the effects of music on the brain’. We all agreed that this was going to be presented as a podcast format with a science theme to it. My group partner and I shared the workload pretty well, and worked together to help each other with our own respective parts.

At the start of the assessment it was fair to say that the group chemistry was not really there and morale was not high at all. Originally we had three group members, and there was not much communication between us to kickstart our project. This lack of communication definitely contributed to the low spirits of the initial stages of our assignment. Furthermore, the loss of a group member did not help either. So ultimately in the first two weeks our assignment we really had no sense direction and also confused about the condition of our lost member. However not delving into the lost member matter too much, we decided to make light of the situation by moving on and focus on our task at hand. I am glad that my group partner and I are able to talk about the assignment as well as on a personal level. This made the communication aspect of the assignment easier and a definite improvement from the first week of the assignment. Things looked promising after the first two weeks. Further examples of this progression included, much more frequent messaging and setting up a date and time to meet and plan the work.

There was a brief period during the middle of the assignment period that we stagnated and struggled to maintain the progress that we made. I do claim fault to this, as I was focussing on other different things. I figured that this was extremely unfair on my group partner and made a strong effort to improve every element that is necessary to form a successful collaborative work. These elements are a reference to Week 9’s Lectorial on collaborative work, where Dr Rachel Wilson highlights that: respect, consistency, clear objectives, good communications and support, are the many factors that result in good collaborations. I placed a huge emphasis on communication, respect and clear objectives to get the project moving. The motivation and the pressure behind completing the assignment was also a motive to really push ourselves to work together and finish. We tried our best not to rush it, despite the little amount of time we had left because we also wanted to do a good job at the same time.

The topic of Music and the Brain was a very scientific topic and most certainly related to the broader topic of ‘attention’. Although for the common folk, this topic can seem technical and dull, there is abundance of information that an be valuable to know, especially for your own psychological health. Music is found to be healthy for the mind, and we really take it for granted. Given the complexity in this field of neuroscience, researching was quite difficult as there was a lot of scientific jargon and complex vocabulary. However we managed to highlight the most relevant parts of our references and use it in our project. We split the topic into two parts. The first part explores the physical aspect of music and the brain; primarily in the context of entrainment. Myself, I decided to talk about the emotions that connect music and memory together. Both parts support each other and ultimately argue for the same thing, which was showing how the brain places a great amount of attention towards music.

In regards to the technical aspect of our project, my group partner, who has a background in music production was mainly editing the audio mix. We felt that it was better to have on person editing as there would be too much confusion between two different styles of editing. As my partner would finished the edit I would go over and listen to it, to give some feed back and refinement. This process worked really well for us and managed to achieve it in a very short period of time.

What I lacked in the contribution to editing was compensated with the direction and the formation of our talk. We all recorded our individual parts and then recorded together where necessary such as the introduction. My group partner was also apart of this process as well, as she pitched in ideas for music and experiments used in the audio.

The stress factor was somewhat helpful, but we still managed to complete the task in time. Overall I am very happy that I was able to partner up with Tianshu, my group partner, as she is someone who is critical and but giving at the same time. These are qualities I appreciate in a group member