The TED Talk: Making the Most of a Niche Topic

The preparation for my TED talk was relatively simple, at least compared to the preparation for my civic artifact speech. I had already thought through most of my material, and, in fact, had already talked through most of it as well (my writing process consists mainly of talking to myself). The real challenges lay in the visual aids and the time limit.

I decided to keep the visual aids simple, as the focus should be mostly on the music and composers. I kept text to a minimum and maintained a black and white scheme for this reason. To make the audio clips, I used a composition program called MuseScore 2.0. The inclusion of the audio clips was suggested to me by Dr. Kramer, and I agreed that it would be effective.

When I initially talked through everything I wanted to say, my speech was around 7 minutes long. I decided to narrow the focus somewhat; while my research paper had extensive material regarding the time periods surrounding serialism, the talk is more focused on just the movement of serialism. This had the added benefit of simplifying the talk, making it easier for the audience to follow.

Due to the somewhat niche nature of my topic, I joked with a classmate that I would have to keep the audience engaged with a series of jokes. Ultimately, I managed to make my talk far more straightforward and relatable than early drafts, but remnants of the humor I tried to inject remained in the form of the "it didn't" joke near the middle of my talk.

I believe that I was rather well-prepared for the talk. I had a good handle on my visual aids, and I got a good night's sleep. In retrospect, however, I should have finalized my talk earlier and given myself more time to rehearse the finalized version.

As for the talk itself, it suffered the usual problems I experience: a lack of variance in my voice and somewhat closed-off body language. Both of these were improved from my civic artifact speech, but they were still not up to par. My posture, especially, is something I wish to work on in the future.

In addition, I could have certainly used my hands more. I tried to demonstrate some concepts with my hands when explaining how composers manipulated tone rows, but, upon watching the video, I have realized that my gestures were not clear enough to get the point across. In preparing for my speech, I should have made a more conscious effort to prescribe the motions of my hands and arms in order to better convey both emotions and messages.