Author Archives: Altan

Sound Effect Story

I decided to play around with Audacity and use Freesounds to tell a story about navigating the airport and a flight taking off.

I had never used Audacity (or any other audio editor) before, so I found it somewhat challenging figuring out the formatting. I ended up just playing around with it for a while until I got my desired audio story! The story is pretty mundane, but recognizable enough to get the listener to understand what is going on.

DS106 Radio

Listening to the DS106 radio and seeing which sounds people picked up on emphasized how people can sometimes get the same vibes from a story, but from different aspects of it. There seemed to be a lot of agreement on the themes of certain sounds/ stories, but everyone was pointing out the sounds that stood out to them to give them that sense. This is similar to watching a show or a movie with a group of people where most people get the general idea of a scene, but notice different visual details. The only difference is the focus on the audio over radio!

I enjoyed seeing the different perspectives and being able to focus on different sounds that others would point out that I did not pick up on as clearly. Getting a sense of how everyone interprets audio differently emphasizes how people can get different lessons out of any type of story, whether visual, audio, or both.

Moon Graffiti

The first minute of “Moon Graffiti” was brilliant and made me think it was going to be a short sci-fi audio story. Once the context was provided for the basis of the story, I found this idea fascinating. Like the hosts pointed out, I never even considered the possibility of the moon landing not succeeding and the president having to give a speech afterwards.

It may seem odd, but I recently went to a concert where the theme was interdimensional space travel. The band would have audio clips between sets with very similar space noises to “Moon Graffiti”. I did not realize it then, but those soundbites really put everyone in the venue in a collective “dream state” that Jad Abumrad was discussing in the YouTube video.

Sound is critical to any story whether it’s a podcast, movie, or concert. Oftentimes, certain sounds are very recognizable, giving the listener a clear picture of the story’s setting. However, certain sounds also have the ability to bring people to places they’ve never been, like the moon. Most likely, anyone listening to the podcast has never been to the moon or to space, but the sounds are commonly used in movies taking place in space and sound like what we would expect this place we’ve never been to to sound like.

Not only are there beeps and boops that give the listener an idea of the setting, but also sounds meant to elicit specific emotions. The increasing volume of sounds used to build suspense comes to mind from the podcast. The eeriness of the scene is also emphasized by certain sounds frequently used in space-themed movies.

Week Three Summary

The first assignment this week was to give our reaction to the design videos. I enjoyed watching these and learning about something I really did not know much about before. You can read more of my thoughts here. It was super cool to see how the title design of one of my favorite shows was made!

The next assignment was the photoblitz, which you can see here! This assignment really brought me back to my high school days when I was taking photography classes and doing things like this all the time. I struggled to think of how I was going to approach this, but decided the best way is to just go for it and hopped in my car to go find the first subject. I think just going for it is always a good way to approach creative assignments like this.

The third assignment was demystifying AI and 2 visual or design assignments from the assignment bank. You can find my demystifying AI here and my other two assignments here and here. I really enjoyed these and relied on AI photo generators, which are my new favorite tool. My dad has always had fun using AI photo generators and now I understand why! It really is a fun tool to play around with and try to get a desired result. I ended up with photos I was proud of after submitting a few different prompts.

I also did three daily creates which are found here, here, and here. These are super fun to get a daily dose of creativity in! I had a great time doing these ones, and honestly liked them all better the most of the daily creates from last week.

I commented on a few classmates posts, but some did not seem to go through and the screen popped up with some code and some red text which I interpret to be not a great sign. I will continue to comment and hope that they do go through and my classmates can see them!

I had a good third week and got some extra rest with the issues in Monroe Hall cancelling some classes. Hopefully I can continue to use my creativity throughout this course and keep learning more about AI and design tools!

Go, Vote!

I decided to have Bing AI photo generator design a poster to encourage people to go vote! The prompt I gave it is “create a poster to encourage people to ‘Go, Vote!’”.

Here is what I got:

This image seems very patriotic and like one I would see if not for the “Ec’omt” at the bottom. It is weird to me that AI image generators toss in random letters or words when they aren’t sure what to put in the space.

Demystifying AI

I started this assignment by choosing Stable Diffusion and Bing as my AI photo generators. My initial prompt was “Grateful Dead”. I got the following images:

I guess stable diffusion is not as aware of the Grateful Dead!

I advanced the prompt to “The Grateful Dead playing in front of a large crowd”.

These are the images I got:

Stable diffusion getting there, but still not too sure.

My next prompt was “The Grateful Dead in the style of Starry Night”. It was rejected by Bing so I changed it to “The Grateful Dead in the style of Picasso”. You know the drill – here are the images:

My “worst” image is the first stable diffusion image since it did not include anything related the Grateful Dead. The most impressive image has to be the original Bing Grateful Dead image since it had to pick up on the dancing bears and the psychedelic Dead theme.

I imagine AI generated art can be a threat to artists in some aspects, especially concert posters. After doing this assignment and seeing some similarities between the posters from concerts and the image that the AI generators put out, I definitely believe that could threaten some artists.

Design Thoughts

I am not very big into design or movies as a whole. I have seen a few TikToks from people who are more savvy in this realm so I knew a little bit, but not a lot. I knew there was a lot of thought that went into movie posters, but I didn’t realize exactly why.

I learned that specific colors and layouts of movie posters can tell the viewer what the movie is about and what they should expect just by looking at the poster. There are also a lot of themes within different genres that I had not noticed before, but now that it was mentioned, I can definitely tell why they do certain things in the posters and pick up on some of the consistent themes. I found the Indie genre poster design especially intriguing since those are the types of movie that I tend to watch.

I did take photography classes throughout high school and I’m now realizing that the art of photography and movie posters are actually quite similar. The use of negative space is a very prominent topic in photography and seeing that in movie posters was very cool. Playing on the human psychology and putting the viewers eyes where you want them is crucial in photography and I’ve learned that it is equally as important in movie posters.

These videos make me wonder if some movies don’t do as well if the poster is not of high quality. I don’t decide whether or not to watch a movie based on the poster, but it impacts which ones I click on on streaming sites to learn more about, so I guess the poster does indirectly impact whether I watch the movie!

Photoblitz

This project was a nostalgic one for me since I took photography classes in high school and had many similar assignments. I always enjoy photography assignments since it makes you look at the world in a different way, especially if you are trying to remember where you saw something that is required (like construction in my photoblitz, for example).

My first step in this process was to hop in my car and go find some construction. I was thinking about the closest place there would be construction and there is always construction on campus, so that’s where I went. However, on my way there I saw a house in my neighborhood with some construction!

Finding that one quickly helped speed up the process. Next up: a fence or a wall. So I set out for the Battleground Athletic complex with a brick wall in mind.

Perfect – the wall was right where I left it! So far so good and I get to turn my attention towards something green. Being already surrounded by trees made it pretty easy, so I pointed the camera up.

Keeping it quick and easy so far. Next up was wheels, which I had a feeling would still be on my car once I got home, so I figured I’d wait on that one. I was headed downtown to take a picture of a new very large, very white apartment complex to emphasize white, but I hit a red light on the way and realized that a red light is quite emphasized, especially for anyone who drives.

I got home and decided to snap the photo of my wheels.

Still going smooth, but only about 5 minutes to go!

Next up is something growing, which I figured would be simple since I have (probably too many) plants in my room. I picked my favorite one and snapped a photo!

Finally, had to find an interesting fabric in the house, so I chose a banner we have hanging in our basement with an interesting texture.

Got it just in time!

Perfect 20 minutes! I loved doing this assignment and taking just 20 minutes to look at the world in a slightly different way.