Meet MCT Group A 2020
Meet MCT Group A 2020
Team Overview
Fun Version
L: Alena wanted to call us KitKat but we all decided against it. This brought us closer together as a team.
A: Moreover, Leigh made fun of my grammar, while I complimented his smile. After this, he decided to call the team Yas Queen, because he promised to agree on everything I’ll say.
C: IDK I envy you guys because you have lovely cats and I don’t have any pets :( We had a cow before, but not anymore.
A: That’s so sad to hear… holy cow…
C: it’s literally holy in India.
L: Sounds like a delicious pet to have. Alena has low Iron in her blood and needs to eat red meat, but cows are holy in India, so we have an internal conflict we will have to overcome.
A: After some struggles, we decided that I’ll just look for some other red meat to eat…
L: I suggest elg, it’s quite popular in Norway. (and not holy in india as far as I know).
A: If you ever saw an elg in India, it was most certainly holy.
C: I am a vegetarian, guys, so it doesn’t matter what you guys eat.
A: Here goes the hope that we’ll have pepperoni pizza together.
C: I will have just the base of the pizza.
L: It’s all about the bass.
A: ALL.
Boring Version
We are the shortest group in the MCT yet, having a diversity of exactly three cultures: an Aussie, an Indian & our Queen, a Romanian, with expertise ranging from Music Production, Cognitive Science, Sound Design, Linguistics to Game Development & a little bit of visual arts. It’s safe to say we all have a weird sense of humor and are introverted extroverts. Even though we just met as our destinies wanted, we all have a common goal which is to SYNTHesize our conformities and challenge our anomalies to create exciting musical innovations
All about Alena Clim (pronounced Queen)
If we were to use only two words to describe Alena, they would be beautiful artist. She has an old soul in a young body and her interests range from music, visual arts, psychology and philosophy to neuroscience, linguistics, technology and hard sciences. After studying Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, she’s ready to combine this with music and learn more about music production, and music cognition and work toward her long-term goal of discovering effective art/musical therapies for people with mental diseases. In her spare time she likes creating artworks, playing piano and dancing both latin and swing.
All about Abhishek Choubey (pronounced Chou-Bay)
Abhishek calls himself a music nerd and music hunter, always on the lookout for good music (recommendations more than welcome). Just like everyone at the MCT, he also has music in his heart. He loves chill electronic beats with lush atmospheres, which is also evident in the productions which he releases under his Artist alias, “Neerr”. He has a wide gamut of interests which he will try converging in the MCT program. Having done his undergrad in Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering he started living music full time. He has also been DJing here & there and loves it. Heavily obsessed with reverb and how it changes the audio he tries to take listeners on a spatial experience with his music. His favorite artists are Flume,Odesza, Shallou & Two Lanes. What are yours? Send him an email.
All about Leigh Murray (pronounced Lee)
Leigh comes from an academic background of games and web development. He began playing piano at the age of 3, trumpet at 6 and guitar at 9. When covid hit in 2020 he began to get back into music production and decided to look for courses to develop his skills in this area. The MCT course at UiO was the perfect opportunity to bring together this background of games development, music and interest in psychology/neuroscience.
Team Skills
Team Reflections
During these first two weeks, we did a lot of fun and interesting activities, while discovering new opportunities and challenges, as it’s the first 100% digital course we are attending. We are a small team but fun, nicely balanced from a skills perspective and very diverse, all being from different countries. The short presentations and the quiz helped understand our various cultural and academic backgrounds and minimize the unconscious biases that might have been present in our class. Something to consider might be to have each class member do similar presentations about themselves in addition to their hometowns as it would help bring the whole class further together as we still don’t know our other classmates very well.
At the team level, we are still trying to find the best ways to collaborate on tasks. This far, we utilised google docs so that we can all contribute simultaneously - it is great for gathering ideas but can result in a less coherent final product and a feeling of “stepping on each other’s toes”. It was useful to have these introductory tasks, as we realised we should consider alternative platforms for future and more complex projects.
It was interesting to see that technology can make things less managed - everyone has equal responsibility within a flat team structure in contrast to a hierarchy with a team leader. In our previous experience, team projects would have each member write their own contribution and then a single member would be responsible for collating them. This is something we may consider for future tasks as it doesn’t rely on everyone being available at the same time (important with different time zones/work schedules) and allows team members to work individually in the way that best suits themselves. Combining our abilities and learning from each other is something we are looking forward to.
It was a bit disheartening to hear from the graduating students that they faced a lot of difficulties in the course despite being on campus together, and how glad they were that they didn’t have to overcome these challenges in addition to the “covid” related issues we are facing this semester. However, we are sure it will be worth the wait to meet physically - and through the Portal (hopefully in the second semester 🤞 !)