Forum - Week 10 – Mass Debate 5

For forum this week I was running on 3 hours sleep, so time felt like it was going backwards. The topic was “Construction and Deconstruction”, and nobody made a single CODEC joke. Until me, just now.

"Craaaaazy" Matt Mazzone

Classmate and all-round good guy “Craaaaaazy” Matt Mazzone deconstructed a television advert that he provided the music and foley for. I ended up being the star of the show, with my squeal sound effect for the turning tap proving to be a huge success. Matt’s use of diagetic and non-diagetic sound in one of his other adverts renewed my faith in tertiary education- this was a prime example of the application of pointless knowledge in real life.

Dragos Cage

Dragos “JC” Nastyman examined how song structures are constructed and deconstructed over time in various pieces of music. I had never really thought about this aspect of music to any great extent, so it was intriguing to hear examples of various artists with different approaches to introducing ideas into a song, and also in removing ideas.


Frederick May was up last (according to my state of mind), and attempted to deconstruct popular music to find out what makes it so popular. Using internet sources, he stated other people’s ideas on the topic, and strangely disabused them straight away. I’m not sure if his point was “Look at how I could not find any serious information on my topic” or “Listen to me prove that there is a lot of crap on the internet”, but in either case I was in agreement. He did quote a section from a book by Michael Stavrou, which stated some psuedo-mathematical formula for the creation of a popular song. I know music is symbiotic with mathematics, but reducing the creative process in composition to 4 addition sums seems a little too easy. One gleaming aspect that was missing from the formula was the ‘addition’ of musical talent, however I suppose the popularity of some dance tracks proves that musical talent does not necessarily need to factor into the creation of a piece of music (sic).


Stephen Whittington, "Forum Week 10: Construction and Deconstruction" Workshop presented in Recording Space, Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 17th May 2007.