Esk

Officially my course began nearly a month ago, and I’m still settling in. Activities that seem to be frequent and recurring include:

1. Reading, reviewing and summarising papers
   1. Looking through journals, conferences etc. for interesting papers
   2. Finding interesting papers only to discover I need a subscription
   3. On gaining access to a paper, finding that the title and abstract do not really reflect the content and in fact it is irrelevant
   4. Finding a relevant paper, starting to read it and discovering that I need more background knowledge from other papers, which returns me to point 2…
2. Defending my thesis before it is written
   1. Being asked what my PhD is about
   2. Trying out a slightly different response each time in the futile hope that someone will go “oh, right” and not ask further questions.
   3. Being asked further questions
   4. Being told “that’s not science” or “that’s not art”, in roughly equal measure
   5. Being told it has already been done
   6. Being told it can’t be done
   7. Continually failing to justify it satisfactorily, probably because I’ve only been working on it a couple of weeks really, and it’s very left-field research in an area most people aren’t familiar with. Hoping to improve this by studious application of section 1.
3. Meeting with my supervisor
   1. Feeling prepared for the meeting
   2. Being asked lots of unexpected questions
   3. Feeling like I’ve been on the wrong track the whole time
   4. Feeling like I have direction again, and becoming confident that I will do the right things next week, leading to 3.1…
4. Spending a lot of time with interesting clever people in the field
   1. Feeling intimidated by their intelligence and experience
   2. Trying to look like I am clever and know things
   3. Trying to learn from them
   4. Finally, just enjoying having the time to chat with all of them, whether the discussion is serious, silly, fruitful or less than useful
   5. Making new friends.

In conclusion, I am having a whale of a time whilst also going through a bit of a rollercoaster of over-confidence and self-doubt. I’m sure it’ll settle down a bit in time. I’m also a bit overwhelmed by the range of literature I need to cover — the project touches on music theory, psychology, social science, data mining, neuroscience, computer cognition… It’s a bit all over the place. Working title is “Investigating beauty in music: a machine learning approach” — ask me about it in person if you want a better explanation. I’m getting better at that.