With only three weeks of dependable internet access available and a bushel & peck of digital dreams to make come true, there just isn’t time to give a proper write-up to the GIF above. This thing is so loaded with potential but I just can’t figure out which way to go with it.
So the challenge is to see if any magic can be made of it through the comments section below. I’m really hoping you step forward and help make something amazing happen here.
This week – an audio letter for my review of DS106 and all the audio assignments I’ve been working on.
Ira Glass has three things you need to be likeable on radio: firstly, a soft, intimate voice that makes you feel like he’s talking directly to you across your kitchen table; secondly, the humility to discuss his own work as something not innately brilliant, but as the culmination of many years of hard graft; and thirdly, a brilliant ear for wonderful, personal stories that make for compelling listening.
This American Life, which I’d never listened to before this week, is a kind of Reader’s Digest on the radio – that is, a sweetshop of tasty morsels, none of which you’d never planned on investigating, but which seem to fascinate nonetheless.
In the episode we were asked to listen to this week, about storytelling, or more specifically, reruns, the framing is classic Ira. Act one is all about action and the Beaver trilogy, a film in which the film maker became obsessed with returning, over and over, to the same subject. The story is gripping because we hear the journalist, the film and the film maker, Trent Harris, all narrating slightly different parts of the narrative. I found the act slightly long-winded, but by the end the effect is that I really wanted a happy ending for hte beaver kid, just as Trent and the jounralist do. I learned that good radio stories are involved, and take the reader on a journey, using the sequencing that Ira references in his video.
I enjoyed the second episode more, perhaps. about couples rerunning each others’ stories – what do relationships do to you and your stories? Despite the journalist speaking to a number of spouses who claim to have heard their partner’s stories over and over again, we find that they don’t in fact tell authentic, accurate versions of their stories. Hearing them realise this is entertaining, and the contrast between the voices is enough of a cue to the listener to expect different angles. Of course there’s also a lot of work behind the scenes to uncover some wonderful stories – as Ira says, the art of good journalism is as much about knowing what to take out as much as to keep in.
Discussion in Act Three of how often the Rosa Parks story has been evoked to explain revolutionary behaviour in many different contexts is an example of ineffective storytelling – where the simile isn’t really apt. But it’s a good example of how the collective subconscious that Jung talks about gathers experiences into each of our memories so we feel like Rosa Parks, for example, is an ancestor of ours when we make a stand. Choosing a person that means something to people can help them find a hook for what you’re telling them.
“House fly” by YIM Hafiz, on Flickr
The ds106 Digital Storytelling course Sound Effects Story Audio Assignment 70 gave me an opportunity to devote some time developing greater familiarity with Audacity and the sound source website, FreeSound.org. While I normally would turn directly to Apple’s GarageBand for something like this, I wanted to see how layering and track editing worked in the open source sound editor.
I was pleased to be able to sort out the various tools without turning to documentation — although I didn’t sort out how to effect a pan from one channel to the other (left to right, in this instance). This will have to be a challenge for the next task. I also missed a simple way of naming the tracks to allow for their easy identification (although the waveforms do develop an identity after you’ve listened to them a few times). However, I did enjoy being able to toggle the interface for each track down to a very slim profile, as that made it easier to align two tracks that didn’t lie adjacent to one another in the stack. Cutting sections from one track was intuitive, and pasting sections into a newly created track worked just as expected.
The audio clips I used for this story are:
• Fly 1.wav
• Simulation of NASA (rocket) launch.wav
• 20061105Furnace.wav
• rocket report and scream.wav
• small_rocket_flybys_and_explosion.aif
While most were edited into the story pretty much in sequence, I did a fair amount of adjustments to the levels of each at various points using the envelope tool, and spent some time blending the Simulation of NASA (rocket) launch clip and the 20061105Furnace clip to get the rocket whine and engine launch. Each of the other three files was clipped, separated into sections, and in some instances (the fly) used multiple times to support the story.
The Andy Griffith Theme Song was sourced at: TelevisionTunes, with the intent of bracketing the story with an audio intro and outtro.
Image: House fly by YIM Hafiz on Flickr
Poetry Reading — MISSION: DS106 Poetry is meant to be read aloud. Select a poem – it can be a personal favorite or one you find randomly – and read it aloud. Explain in your recording why you chose that poem.
Lots of S sounds I am afraid.
I am reading a poem by my daughter about hillwalking.
Having spent the better part of a Sunday trying to figure out how to move around and build in Facebook’s recent 3D virtual world application Cloud Party, I still have no idea what to make of it. I learned about Cloud Party earlier this week through the Second Life Educators Discussion (SLED) mailing list. Initial reports were that there were far more things right about it than were wrong.
Reading reports from SL educators Ellie and Iggy, encouraged me to look up the password for my rarely used Facebook account so I could experience Cloud Party first hand. My initial experiences there were similar to those noted by both reviewers in that I encountered a significant number of experienced Second Life builders.
At one point there were nearly two dozen avatars walking around and trying to learn how to use the building controls. Questions I typed in to text chat, such as how to jump or how to apply a texture to an object, were quickly answered in a cordial way by those who’d already figured it out. For jumping the answer was easy: press the space bar.
Uploading and applying a texture proved to much more difficult. Even with a useful forum section which addresses a wide range of topics, it took me several rounds of trial and error to finally reach a close approximation of what I was hoping to do.
As mentioned in the video made while doing another Google+ Hangout, I mentioned that it fels like this is going to be a very big deal. I intend to keep an eye this Cloud Party.
How would you like to have the support of six seven classic authors sitting at your table, collaborating with you as you compose your next great piece of writing?
My friend and colleague Doug Peterson has a new blog post waiting every morning at 5:01 am, and this morning’s post prompted me to immediately launch the web browser on my iPad to test out his latest find on the web, Google’s demo Masters Edition. Shortly thereafter, I was sitting at my computer, running a screen capture as I pounded out the opening lines to my next great epic.
Now granted, I didn’t give The Masters a lot to work with. And I would assume that in their day they needed editing for context and syntax in their writing, too — in this instance, their contributions didn’t necessarily always get the gist spot on. Perhaps I was expecting that their additions would automatically improve the quality of the writing piece, and rather, need to see them more as collaborators, merely contributing suggestions. It must be up to us as the writer to make the final call.
Here is my tentative text, augmented with colour to highlight each author’s initial contribution. You will note that a couple of extra lines were added by Poe and Shakespeare after the video capture was stopped. Clearly, those two weren’t paying attention at the time.
It was a gloomy and stormy night. Snoopy comfortably esconced huddled over his typewriter. That dratted Black Baron was up to no good again.
Suddenly, Woodstock as well as his tiny little yellow friends appeared, flittering around the dog house, attempting to cheer Snoopy up.
Under the canopy of darkness, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage, the triplane of the nemesis of all good. “What shall I do presently?” imagined Snoopy, as he lowered his goggles and wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck. “This wilt be the undoing of me and my tiny little feathered friends!”
As the shining eye of heaven rose, and Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel rose into the sky and headed into battle, the birds began to issue forth their morning war cry, and the day was good. I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat. … Let not sloth dim your horrors new-begot.
I’ve indicated below my take on the contributions (how many of their suggestions “might work” out of the total number of suggestions offered).
• Nietzsche 0/0 no contributions
• Shakespeare 1/4 I kind of like “shining eye of heaven” in place of “sun”
• Dostoyevsky 0/0 no contributions
• Dickinson 0/0 no contributions
• Dickens 0/1 totally out of context, man!
• Poe 2/7 points for effort, Edgar! Not sure about that cat comment though.
While I don’t know that I would select any of Poe’s suggestions specifically, at least, “gloomy,” “as well as,” “presently,” and “imagined” kind of fit into the flow. So half a point each. But changing the Red Baron to the Black Baron is right out.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give Shultz a nod:
• Shultz Great characters, that dog house setting is a little sparse.
Perhaps you can give it a whirl and offer your own thoughts?
By the way, while a search on Google resulted in multiple instances of Shultz’s image of Snoopy typing “It was a dark and stormy night,” these two images both came from a post titled “11 Great Writing Tips and Overcoming Writers’ Block.” FWIW.
If you are interested in seeing the real time authoring, I’ll be posting it to the Youtube.
For Audio Assignment 466 I created my own alarm clock. The goal was to use sounds around us (no music, no voice). I am not one of those people who wake up easily and there are very few sounds that don’t irritate me early in the morning. However, I remembered the recording of nightingales I made last spring when I was in my holiday house in the country. My first idea was to use them to help me fall asleep, but instead they just woke me up even more. So, reassigning them to their new role was a logical thing:
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Sergey Yeliseev
For Audio Assignment 152 I created my own ringtone. I used Roc by Aviary, which lets you create your own music. The drums I chose all come from the African Percussion section:
Roc is easy to use, especially if you watch the tutorial first. If you decide to play with Roc (it is highly addictive), you will find out that, due to its repetitive nature, Roc “music” is suitable for ringtones and alarm clocks.
I like this assignment because of its practical purpose. Whether you decide to actually use the ringtone or not, you will have good fun.
Sorry, but camp is over! Head over to ds106
The Campfires have all been put out.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
