For yesterday’s Daily Create we were to make blackout poetry with content from a certain web site. I looked at it briefly and decided to use the Weird Old Book Finder instead, probably because I found the typography uninspiring. I searched WOBF for eclipse, skimmed a few titles and picked a random page from one. I unfortunately neglected to note the title. I highlighted some phrases that caught my eye and blacked out the rest. I saw the black void in the middle of the image and decided to drop an eclipse shot in there. In hindsight, I should have done something about the line at the top of the eclipse image, so I softened it a bit for the image above.
The TDC was appropriate for Eclipse Day, but even more so for me as I had traveled to the path of totality. I was under complete cloud cover and couldn’t see the event, but that’s okay because I was more interested in the environment and seeing/hearing how wildlife reacted. Here’s a short recording of the sounds of the area about an hour before the light went out:
I wanted to broadcast to ds106radio but my phone has been uncooperative. Maybe that’s okay because technology shouldn’t have been my focus in the moment. I can’t say the animals (deer, squirrels, chipmunks, birds) seemed any different than usual in the lead-in to the eclipse. As it started getting visibly darker, it got very quiet. It wasn’t a very quick process, but every time I blinked it was noticeably darker. I wouldn’t say it got night-time dark, but it was very close to it for a few minutes. There was no moon or stars behind the clouds for that slight dim light that happens at night, but there was dim light on the horizon. I thought heard the hoot of an owl, and definitely heard the howls of some coyotes. Also some cheers and fireworks from the crowd outside the woods. Then it started to get lighter, but not like a sunrise since the sun was mid-afternoon overhead. Quite the amazing experience. As it grew lighter there was a lot of bird chatter, like you might hear over the course of dawn but compressed into a few minutes. I’ve had worse Mondays.
Jim and I have periodic conversations about what we’re doing and where we’re going in de106. I had this idea that the chief legal counsel from Aggressive Technologies would drop in and threaten us with a cease and desist order if we didn’t stop talking about their company. This would create another potential plot point the class might build stories around. We invited ds106 co-founder Martha Burtis to play the part of the lawyer, and her performance left us, me at least, literally dumbfounded.
Jim recorded our meeting and I went through and edited it. I downloaded a bleep sound effect to deal with some of the more aggressive language and imported the components into iMovie. I went through and chopped out extended pauses and “um”s and such, which ended up trimming three minutes off of the run time. At first I tried putting the bleeps in with iMovie, but between the small screen on my MacBook Air and the imprecision of the trackpad, it was getting very difficult. So instead I left the language in and shared the edited piece as a file. I imported the file into Audacity and added the bleeps there on an additional track, and used the Effect=>Amplify function to reduce the volume of the f-bombs.
The bleep track was still a little loud so I used the volume slider to take it down a few dbs. I exported it as an MP3 and then imported that into iMovie. I reduced the video soundtrack to zero and dropped the MP3 in to get the final version. Obviously my bleeping skills leave something to be desired, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
I thought the tone of her spiel would pair well with our friend Bob, so I had him do the intro and outro, and layered some calming music, Reflected Light from SergePavkinMusic, in the background. I think it’s really a win-win, as the track puts Aggressive Technologies in a positive light, and lets them promote their beloved ds106 at the same time. They’re sure to let bygones be bygones now, right?
We had our first night of ds106radio broadcasts last night, with a possible record crowd. At one point the ds106radio page said we had 23 listeners, although some may have been ghosts and doubles. They were treated to Isaiah Beacon’s Logic Pod show and Ravioli Radio, two excellent shows. I was curious as to why Beacon did a commercial on Ravioli Radio. Coincidence? I suspect there’s a story there, but no one said anything.
I was able to bring a few of the creators on air to talk about their processes. This had been an iffy proposition in the past when I used Ladiocast to broadcast. This time around I used Audio Hijack, which made working with multiple inputs easier. Here’s my setup: I used Quicktime to play the show recordings, a Logitech headset to monitor and speak, and brought people on air through Streamyard on Firefox. There was a slight hiccup in the first on-air conversation in that I had the Logitech input turned off, so ds106radio listeners only heard half the conversation and were a bit confused. They got the important half of the discussion though, and I got it straightened out for the subsequent conversation. Live-futzing is something of a tradition on ds106ardio.
The class shows will be broadcast Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at 7pm. I would like to do it at noon, but so far only three people indicated that they could be available. If we get a few more we may add a noon session. We will listen on ds106radio and discuss in Discord in the ds106radio channel. If the tech is cooperative and people are willing, I would like to get people on air to talk about their shows. Those may be big IFs. We would like at least one person from each group to be listening and on Discord when the group’s show is broadcast to answer questions about the show. Everyone should listen to at least one other group’s show and blog about the experience. Tag this post showlistening.
Schedule: Monday 7PM: Ravioli Radio, Logic Pod
Tuesday 7PM: Pop Perceptive, Three Point Chatter
Wednesday 7PM: Digital Agencies, Aggressive Testimonials
2. Video
For weeks 11 and 12, we will expand on our video work, specifically looking at what we can do with manipulation. Some people were able to animate Dr. Oblivion a few weeks ago with the Wav2Lip script, and someone even got Frank to say a few words. Let’s experiment further. You can use that script on other videos. Some points to be aware of:
For Wav2lip, video clips cannot be more than 60 seconds or the script will fail
videos appear to work best when one person is talking, more or less directly at the camera. See video above.
There is also public domain video in the Internet Archive, for example in the Prelinger Archives. Some content there is in questionable taste, so proceed cautiously.
People found a few other ways to animate characters. Whatever works is okay. Even if you have to resort to the level of fakery from the other week’s video.
If you find the idea of fakery objectionable, feel free to find another way to animate. There may be useful tools on the Week 8 list or in people’s AI pitches.
The video project for this and next week should have some sort of narrative involving the course theme of AI, your course character, Aggressive Technologies, Dr. Oblivion, or any combination thereof. As always, it is up to you to decide how to interpret this, and creativity is encouraged. You may choose to build off of ideas developed in your radio projects, or you may try something different. The project must incorporate editing, clips, audio, graphics and text or titles. It should have an opening and an ending.
The point here is to create a video narrative, and to push your boundaries by experimenting with a variety of video components and techniques. I am not specifying a time length because it can take hours of work to plan and produce a well-edited two-minute video, or it could take almost no work to point a camera at something for twenty minutes. If it’s something you want to show off to people and it gives you a lot to blog about, it is a good project.
You all have the option of working in groups on this project. All group members must blog about their work for the project. You can also work independently.
Due Friday, 4/5 by midnight:
A blog post on the radio show listening experience
A blog post on your video project plan and progress. Tag this videoplan. This post will include a detailed outline or storyboard of the script.
Due Friday, 4/12 by midnight:
Embed your video in a post tagged videoproject, along with the usual detailed reflective analysis.
3. Daily Creates – Let’s do 3 each week.
4. Commenting – as usual.
5. Looking ahead
We have five weeks left in ds106. Here is our plan going forward.
Week 11 & 12: ds106radio listening and video project planning
Week 13: final project planning
Week 14: final project completion
The final project will also be an optional group or individual project.
Your project should showcase the multiple digital media skills you have developed over the semester. It could take the form of a post or a subdomain with embedded media, or a complex video incorporating audio production and design, or something else if you have a better idea.
Characters and Aggressive Technologies – bring some of the story threads the class has developed of the past several weeks to a conclusion
Analysis of pros & cons of artificial intelligence based on course experiences. What can we do with AI? What should we do with AI?
One of the things that makes ds106 what we know and love is the student input. Do you have ideas for final project prompts? It should be something that builds upon what we’ve been doing, involves the use of a variety of digital media, and gives people room for creative exploration. Feel free to post ideas, thoughts or questions in the #finalprojects channel in Discord
Jim and I were having one of our usual ds106 discussions last week, looking over Aggressive Technologies’ website, when their chief legal counsel dropped in with threats and bluster. She expressed some rather strong opinions. I went through and cleaned them up a little for the recording above, although my bleeping skills leave something to be desired.
This is certainly concerning. The whole episode left me a bit speechless. I asked Dr. Oblivion for his advice:
He further opined:
We’ve dealt with issues before in ds106. We’ve been hacked. We’ve had moles. We’ve dealt with the Russians. And the zombies. But this feels different. And it raises some questions.
What does ds106 think? Do we blow off their threats? Or take them head on? Do they really have eyes and ears within ds106?
Do we have a mole? And if so, what should we do about it? Is her concern really “fiduciary duty?” Or do they have something to hide, and their threats are really just to scare us off their trail? What are they up to? How should we respond?
With a few exceptions, it sounds like everyone’s ds106 radio groups are running smoothly, and everyone is on track. I look forward to hearing the finished projects this weekend.
Dr. Oblivion’s advice here on sound quality and transitions is very much on point. (And bravo for making use of him.) A common issue is one of sound levels and balancing. When layering voices and background music and sounds, the background needs to be loud enough to be effective, but not so much as to be overpowering. This may require some experimentation. One of the benefits of having a group is you can get an objective opinion from them.
The Isaiah Beacon audio bits make good examples. The second one is interesting because the voice and background music are so familiar, like they’ve been used elsewhere, multiple times, so it feels like exactly what one would expect in a commercial.
One comment that normally comes up repeatedly during audio weeks in ds106 is how much people are bothered by the sounds of their own voices. But this semester, so many people are using artificial voices, so far, that that hasn’t happened. Some of the voices have a computer-generated quality to them, unlike Dr. Oblivion. It will be interesting to hear how that impacts the shows.
Radio listening, part II
The plan is to broadcast the completed radio projects on ds106radio during week 11. I’m hoping to bring Jim into the loop, which would necessitate a different broadcast schedule. My question for everyone is: Who would be available to participate in live listening and discussion at noon on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, April 1-3? I made a Doodle poll for this purpose, which will go out via email.
Depending on people’s availability, we may schedule noontime listening in addition to or instead of 7pm listening. I would like to get as many people as possible listening to as many shows as possible, because I am sure everyone will be impressed with everyone else’s work.
Behind the bot
I also need to share this video from Reclaim Today:
Michael Branson Smith talks a bit about what’s going on behind the scenes with Dr. Oblivion, and explains some of his occasional odd behavior. I would be very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. In particular I’d like to know how Dr. Oblivion’s voice affects people’s reactions to what he has to say. Personally, I think the voice, cadence, inflection and accent all work together to convey a significant amount of information that is not included in the text of his responses, but familiarity colors my reaction.
You can see everyone’s AI pitches here: https://ds106.ai/category/aipitch/. I recommend looking them over because you may find a tool you can use in the upcoming weeks. I noticed some people didn’t link to the tools they promoted, which is surprising for a couple reasons. One, it’s like trying to sell a car without letting the customer see it, let alone take a test drive. And more importantly, hyperlinking is a fundamental element of digital text. This is the web, people! Without links, a post is just a strand of silk floating in the breeze.
I asked the great and wise Dr. Oblivion for his thoughts on this, and he responded in full attitude:
I didn’t specify that the pitch should link to the product because, to me, that’s just common sense. But maybe it’s not. Also, I suspect people have been trained to look for rules and rubrics and may not be used to the kind of freedom of interpretation they have here. But in any case, links to the tools are on the Week 8 page, and there is a good variety so take a look and see if you can make use of any of them in your creative endeavors.
One tool I’ve been using regularly is the MP3 to TEXT tool from Converter.app. It saves me the trouble of transcribing Dr. Oblivion, which is great for adding grammatically correct captions to Youtube videos. It’s a great timesaver on podcasts too, when they don’t offer transcripts. There are a lot of other converters, but converter.app gives you something the others don’t: Free sentences! For example, at the end of Dr. Oblivion’s response above, it added “At this point we have some scenarios that are interested in producing the vision of the AI’s team.” I have no idea where that came from or why it did it. Does it hallucinate like ChatGPT? Does it go a little off the rails every once in a while like Dr. Oblivion? It’s an AI tool that goes above and beyond the call of duty.
Speaking of above and beyond, in a conference call the other day with Dr. Oblivion’s creator and inspiration, I shared the Aggressive Technologies website that Feli created. They were as impressed as I was. When we say ds106 is #4life it is because people get inspired to go above and beyond and create amazing things like this. Now the challenge for the rest of the class is to see if there are ways to tie the site to their stories. Not that anyone has to, but it would be wonderful if they can.
Making this week’s video was an experience. Being radio week, I had the idea to incorporate the DJ from The Warriors and wanted to use Wav2Lip to see how the syncing would work in a tight close-up. I used a generic synthetic voice for the audio because I didn’t think replicating the original voice would matter. The syncing script wouldn’t work though, because it said it couldn’t find a face to sync. Was it because it couldn’t find a nose and eyes to orient itself? In a previous video, the tool found non-face elements to sync, but maybe that happened because there had been a face in that part of the screen. So I opted for old-school dubbing, where they didn’t even try. It was nice that “boppers” almost lined up where it should though. For the music I used a Bob Ross mashup left over from a few semesters ago.
Then I wanted to bring Dr. Oblivion in, but found that he wasn’t answering his screen. It just went to static and stayed there. He’s since been found and is in good health, so don’t worry, but in the meantime I thought I’d enlist HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey to act as a sub. I had previously cloned his voice because I had been thinking about staging a HAL vs KITT AI rap battle, and I wouldn’t have to worry about the lip syncing.
If HAL was really going to sub for the doctor, he should inhabit the TV. So I took a screenshot of the TV and put it in Photopea. I also found a GIF of HAL and brought that in as well. I checked the image sizes and made them both the same height. The HAL GIF was wider, but I could crop it later. I copied the TV and pasted it in as the top layer of the GIF, then erased the static on the screen so you could see HAL underneath. Since the TV was not an animated layer and it was on top, the animation, such as it was, would play underneath as if it was on the TV. Then I cropped it to the width of the TV layer and exported it as a GIF.
But I don’t think a GIF would work in iMovie, so I googled for a GIF to MP4 converter and used the first one that came up. I imported all the bits into iMovie – my part, the Max Headroom background, the Warriors DJ, the HAL MP4 and an MP3 I made with ElevenLabs. A nice thing about the MP3 is that the voice cloner picked up HAL’s background hum. The MP4 was only 4 seconds so I copied and pasted it a bunch of times. I had to split clips and move things around to get it in order for the video, and then I had to redo it because in all the confusion I left HAL with a lengthy stretch of dead air.
So it’s something, but naturally could be better. As much as I like HAL, he’s easier to take in shorter bits. The video could be more coherent, and certainly needs a better conclusion, but it’s a one-off that probably won’t get much play anyway. But it was a good experience to work through because I get to see what works and what doesn’t, and I can use that in the future.
For weeks 9 and 10 we will be working on producing long-form audio narratives, AKA radio shows. The shows will be broadcast on ds106radio the week after they are due.
Group Radio Show Guidelines
The radio show will be a group project. You will have two weeks to complete the project. These are the specifications:
The show must have some sort of narrative, and it must connect to the course theme of AI in some way. How you go about that is up to you. Creativity is encouraged.
Consider what a show should sound like. There needs to be an opening and a closing. You may need transitional elements. You will need to do audio production. This will include editing sections together, layering in background sounds, incorporating music, etc. It must not be just a recording of a conversation.
On the subject of music – in the past some people had their work blocked by Soundcloud due to copyright violation. You can use CC Search to find openly licensed music and other media. You could also google open source music. You won’t find hits, but you will find things you can use.
All group members must contribute to the final radio show. I recommend you create a Google Doc for planning and collaboration. If you invite me to be part of it, I can offer advice and input. It’s up to you. But I recommend it.
The total show should be around 20 – 30 minutes, equal at least 5-7 minutes times the number of members in your group (for example, a three person group would produce a show of about 20 minutes; five people would go about half an hour.)
The show must include at least 3 ds106 radio bumpers (they can be specific to the show or general bumpers for ds106radio) that are produced by group members.
The show must include at least 3 commercials that the group creates. These are opportunities to do something creative that may or may not directly tie to the narrative of the show.
Blog about your process and progress. Every member is expected to blog at least once during the first week about progress; every member is expected to blog at least once during the second week about the completion of the project. These should be substantive blog posts in which you explain what progress/decisions the group had made, what individual work you’ve been doing, what tools/tech you’re using, what’s going well, what’s not working, etc. tag: radioshowweek1& radioshoweek2
Each group member needs to do at least one promo poster/bumper sticker/logo etc. for their show during the first week — a little splash of design work.
Keep the instructor apprised of your progress. You can email me, send me messages on Mastodon or Discord, etc.
As you found out during Intro to Audio week, audio editing is time consuming. Plan to be done early and you will probably be done on time.
Summary of Deadlines and Assignments for the next 2 class weeks
Due by Midnight 3/22 (Summarized, as usual, in a weekly post):
Radio Show Progress:A blog post on your radio show process and progress. Tag this radioshowweek1
Radio Show Design Project:A blog post for your radio show poster/bumper sticker/logo etc. Write this post just like you would an assignment post — with the same amount of detail we usually expect! Tag this radioshowpromo
Commenting: Everyone needs to be reading/commenting on other students’ work.
Audio Assignments: Complete at least 2. You should use your audio assignments to develop content for your radio show (bumpers, commercials, intros/outros/transitions, etc.). We are assigning these this week so that you make progress on developing content for your shows! If you do random assignments just to make the quota you are wasting your time and efforts. Feel free to bend or create assignments to suit your needs.
Daily Creates:Complete 3 TDCs this week.
Due by Midnight 3/29 (Summarized, as usual, in a weekly post):
Completed radio show. Upload it to Soundcloud or Google Drive.
Remember to check “Enable direct downloads” in Soundcloud so we can get your show on the air
Radio Show Progress: Second blog post summarizing your radio show process and progress. Tag: radioshowweek2
Commenting: The more, the better. It may be a challenge this week though.
Daily Creates:Complete 2 TDCs this week.
Audio resources:
In addition to the Audio Resources page, here are a few additional items worth reviewing:
The UMW Digital Knowledge Center is available for tutorials for audio editing. You can schedule a tutorials for assignments and the radio show here: https://dkc.umw.edu/
After reflecting on our 
I used Quicktime to play the show recordings, a Logitech headset to monitor and speak, and brought people on air through 
You can see everyone’s AI pitches here: 