The first one was what I would be if I was reincarnated as a plant. As a self sufficient that isn’t dependent on excessive water, I thought that being an aloe plant would give me the highest potential of surviving.
This next one is if I was a flag. Just noticed that both this create and the previous one were both me becoming something other than human. I looked up a GIF of a golf flag and a ball. Wasn’t very creative but I really wanted to use this GIF!
The last one is HTML code of YouTube pasted into my IDE. An IDE is an Integrated Development Environment, which is basically just software used to build and edit code. I thought that pasting it into this IDE made the code look a little more colorful, but this also introduced a lot of syntax errors, indicated by the red squiggly lines beneath the code. This is because my IDE wasn’t meant to be used for HTML; it was created for Java. For TDC purposes however, it worked out as an artistic choice.
I tuned into the Monday broadcast of ds106 radio, where both our own show and another was played. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of people that showed up to listen to the entire 1.5ish hours. It was fun to chat with other classmates as well as Professor Bond about the shows live, and it felt like a coming together of ds106 that we have periodically throughout the semester.
For the first segment of the show, we listened to Logic Pod, which was the show that our group created. This was my third time listening to the entire podcast with no interruptions or skipping, and my experience changed with each listen. The first time, I wasn’t too keen on the details and just wanted to pump out a completed show to finish the assignment. The second time, I listened to it with a friend and focused more on enjoying the show and taking in how it makes us feel.
During the third listen for ds106 radio, I began to be much more critical of our work. In terms of the editing, I realized that the audio could have been balanced much better, and a few of the cuts to different speakers were too abrupt. Definitely nitpicky, but good reflections regardless.
I got the chance to go on air live with Professor Bond and talk a little more about the process. Other than a few technical issues, it was awesome yet nerve-wracking to be on air live in front of almost 20 people.
The second portion of the show was dedicated to Ravioli Radio. Right off the bat, I noticed that their show was very similar to ours; a podcast style discussion where different topics are brought into focus. However, I quickly realized that their use of audio clips and the tone of the topics contrasted heavily to our own show.
From an overall vibe standpoint, Ravioli Radio felt like a few friends gathered together to have a good time. It was a breath of fresh air to have more lighthearted topics, while still keeping the format of a good podcast. It felt much less transactional than Logic Pod, where all of our characters meant business and each of us had our own agenda to push in a limited amount of time.
I really appreciated Ravioli Radio’s usage of sound effects, particularly the applause and the addition of a live audience. The use of these sounds never felt redundant, as each audience clip was slightly different from the others, and wasn’t overused. It added another element of depth and immersion to the show, and it made me think about the things I can add to my projects in the next few weeks.
It was a long grueling 7 hours, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Definitely the most fun and fulfilling projects to date, but it was a LOT of work. I learned a lot about audio editing, and I think my workflow would have been cut down to half the time or less if I had more experience or more expert skills to be more efficient.
As always, here are my daily creates for the week.
This week marked the completion of our group’s radio show. I was in charge of primarily doing the final edit, so I will speak mostly on that. The script and dialogue choices were excellent from my team!
There were a good amount of changes from last week. Taking the feedback from Professor Bond and after some discussions, we realized that having a recording day and trying to record a podcast live would be a difficult task. We decided on writing a script and recording our own pieces of dialogue instead. We compiled all of this as well as our commercials and bumpers in our discord group chat for easy file transfer.
The downside to this was that we were not on the same page with each and every dialogue piece. A lot of our recordings were not in response to others, and I since I was unfortunately busy throughout the week, I wasn’t able to add my own dialogue into the script. As a solution, I used my character almost like a glue piece. I tried to make responses to what the other members said, rather than stating my own opinions on our topics. I believe that this made our podcast more coherent and gave it a bit more “flow”.
Since I was in charge of making the final product and editing the clips together, I decided to sprinkle in some of my flair and directed the podcast towards more of a narrative, one that blended each of our initial ideas from our posts together, and add some of the sound effect design we heard during the radio week and listening to ds106 radio. Much of the audio and background tracks were already included by the group members’ commercial and bumper projects, but I had to make my own additions for the introduction and closing, as well as adding some sound effects.
This is what some of my workflow in audacity looked like. By the end of it all, there were so many different segments I had to keep track of. Initially, I thought this would be just an easy mashup of all of the clips sent to me, but soon enough I was overwhelmed by the amount of clips I had to keep track of in both the audacity interface as well as on my computer files. I had to make a separate checklist to see which ones I’ve used already, and make a sequence of files that I can follow while staying on script.
The biggest hurdle I faced while editing was adjusting the volume of different segments. The talking, AI voices, commercials, and bumpers were not the same volume. Each separate “block” of audio had to be set at a specific volume, either raising or lowering it. I decided to group most of the same type of file into one block. For example, all of my dialogue for Hwei was put together in a single block. Both Rikaro and Isaiah’s voices had similar volumes, so I was able to put those two together.
There were some pieces of audio that were either super quiet or super loud, so I had to make a separate block for these and adjust accordingly. This made the UI very congested, as I had to scroll up and down to match the audios to the correct timing. I ended up with almost 10 different blocks! If I didn’t implement the organization tactics, I would have been very confused. It’s the same as writing a bunch of “spaghetti code” in programming. A lot of jumbled up code, but it’s hard to work with and it ends up becoming a bunch of nonsense.
Another hurdle I had to overcome was my own OCD. I ended spending almost 7 straight hours on creating the final version of this edit, and much of the time was dedicated to trying to perfect the timings of transitions, and how some of the music purposefully bleeds into the transitions when we came back to the discussion portion of the podcast. For example, I made sure that the end of the bumper music would fade out at the optimal time while I blended in Isaiah’s voice back in to create a seamless transition effect.
The edit that I’m most proud of is Hwei’s last piece of dialogue, where my character starts to disagree heavily with the direction of the podcast and the group’s clashing ideals of AI. To add an aura of suspicion and uneasiness, I added a backtrack to the dialogue portion, which wouldn’t usually be done for a podcast, but I wanted to add a some element of a radio story theme to the final product, just like the stories we listened to during ds106 radio.
While trying to find a suitable audio clip on freesound.org, I suddenly had the inspiration to add the soundtrack from one of my favorite games, Persona 4.
I played this game way back when I was a high schooler, but much of the Persona series music sticks with me to this day. I think this song fits perfectly with the vibe that I was trying to portray; a sense of mystery, uneasiness, and conflict.
To conclude this sequence, I added the phone hang up beep at the perfect part of the audio clip, where a few seconds has passed since Hwei stopped talking, but the audio clip continued to play. Just before the second sequence of the track went on, I abruptly ended it. I then purposely left a big gap between the end of the sequence and Isaiah continuing on with his show to make it clear that Isaiah was taken aback, and was thinking about how to proceed afterwards.
If I could have coordinated with my group AFTER having this idea, I would’ve had Isaiah and Rikaro react to my aggressive monologue, but I think it’s almost poetic that Isaiah brushed it off. Business as usual for the man with the agenda, as if nothing happened. Isaiah then announces that the next guest will be from Aggressive Technologies, completely disrespecting what Hwei said in the previous segment. I think this last portion of the show captured the storytelling aspect of our show, and I’m really proud of the editing and narrative direction I took.
Looking back, I definitely did not have to obsess over every millisecond of detail, but I actually had so much fun trying to create my own masterpiece! Definitely all part of the learning process.
This is what my final Audacity file looked like zoomed out. While this doesn’t look like that much, it felt like a TON during the process. There were small intricate timings in between each of those boxes of audio, and I learned to not take the small details lightly. Again, I am very proud of our work on this project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what others in the class think, as well as some of my close friends that I might send this project to!
This first one was an image I found for what I thought would be a cool concept for a bicycle. Though, now that I think back on it, this would be classified more as a flying car rather than a bike. All of the extra zero gravity would make it a hard sell for being just a bike.
The other one was a splatter art painting using this website. I played around with the number, splat size, and wobble to create a one of a kind design.
This week was the start of our DS106 radio show group projects.
I went into the majority of the process in the Radio show progress post below. The main thing we did was get together on Discord to figure out which narrative direction we wanted to take the show, and what to complete for week 1.
As an addition to this post, I just wanted to mention that we’re thinking of taking the podcast into a different direction, where the recording process would not be as much of a hassle. I will document this more in the week 2 post if we decide to go with it. We may not be directly having a dialogue with each other, rather, we may have our own segments and splice those together, but we would still be reacting to the other participants.
For the design assignment, I decided to make a poster for our podcast.
These were relatively quick and easy to make, but I know that we’re gonna have to make a lot more of the audio transitions and background sounds to fill the show, so that’ll be a challenge for next week. I especially liked writing the script for the Hwei commercial to sell AI augmented body parts, and I think we’ll be doing a lot more of that scriptwriting in our actual show.
And of course, here are my daily creates for the week summed up in a neat package.
All in all, this wasn’t a crazy busy week, but I know that next week will be one of the most hectic in all of DS106 history, as we’re all going to be scrambling to finish our radio shows.
During spring break, I reached out to Mustafa to join forces in creating a show that would fit both of our characters. As we rounded out the group with Melea and Tyler, I looked through their blogs to see how our characters could get together and interact to create a fun show. I was pleasantly surprised as to how our characters complimented one another, but also how many of our ideals would clash with one another. This made us think of some dramatic interactions that our characters could have.
We met on Discord first to lay out the general outline of the podcast, and to choose a narrative. I was originally thinking of using a plot where Mustafa’s character Rikaro is slowly figured out as a fugitive, but we ended up leaning more towards the talk show aspect of the podcast, where each character will bring in their own topic to discuss for a segment of the show.
Some of the other logistics we discussed were things such as the method of recording, length of show, and the title of the show.
We took a solid 10 minutes to all brainstorm a good title for our podcast, and we ended up with Logic Pod: The Tech Podium. This was a good general title without giving away too much of what the narrative will be
For the method of recording, we were deciding between having a set script or having general ideas and having a more free-flowing discussion. On one hand, having a script would give us full control over what the content of the show would be, but it may come off as a bit robotic and staged. On the other hand, a free-flowing “one-take” discussion brings in awkward silences and miscommunication if done incorrectly. We are currently leaning towards a structured conversation with a full script, but we will continue to monitor the format as we work through the project.
For some of our characters, their personalities and characterizations required voice changers. For Melea, since her character is a male, she wanted to use an AI voice changer for the conversation. We are looking into different tools to make this happen and to implement this in a not so jarring way.
We concluded with sorting out the work necessary for this week, which was to finish the assigned work (which would conveniently give us more content for the show), and to work on the script for our show so that we can record on a night that everyone can meet. Recording will take place in week 2, and hopefully we can edit everything together in a neat little package.
Currently, I have taken on the role of splicing all of the audio together after they are sent to me, including the different commercials, bumpers, and sounds that we want to use as well as editing the podcast itself, and I’ll document that next week as the process continues. We decided on one person to do the editing as it would be difficult to work on different audacity files all at the same time without it being directly uploaded live to a cloud system.
“Create a 30-45 second radio commercial for a product from the 80’s. Add in some background music and/or sound effects to make it sound like a real radio commercial.“
I made a commercial fitting for my character, Hwei. He is attempting to sell AI powered prosthetic body augments with the promise of alleviating pain and enhancing performance. I think something like this is how Hwei would first introduce his inventions to the market, but not necessarily for monetary gain. This type of advertisement, if successful, would slowly introduce his inventions to society, and eventually making all of society accustom to getting this procedure done.
Most of the lines I chose were not sales tactics that you’d normally see in advertisements other than the intro that poses a question and then a solution. That is what makes Hwei’s commercial unique; no upselling, no monetary value mentioned. This also definitely isn’t from the 80’s but I took Professor Bond’s offer of bending assignments to meet our show, so I just did a regular commercial for this.
"Make a sick beat, using whatever you can find on freesounds.org, and whatever you can record around you! I don’t care how long it is, just get groovy dood."
I bent this audio assignment a little bit to meet our needs for the podcast. I decided to go on freesound.org to find a suitable introduction song to our podcast. Actually, as we’re still in the process of splicing things together and deciding on which audio files would work for each scenario, I think that this may end up being a transition of some sort. There are a few other audio clips from the website that we have in mind but we won’t know for sure which ones to use until the rest of our show is structured.
I think this sound in particular has a very tech-y sound signature to it, and it’s almost stereotypically high tech with the synths and chords that go into it. We’ll see where this goes in our show, but I’m glad to have one piece of audio that would suit many aspects of our show.
For my design for our radio show, I decided to do a show poster / logo that would compliment our topic.
Logic Pod: The Tech Podium is our podcast name. A lot of our initial discussion for our show was about how intellectually sophisticated our characters were. This made us think of a brain as a visual implication of intelligence, which is sort of ironic when all of our characters are talking about AI in some way, which does not function with a physical brain. The “logical” side of the equation is shown by the brain, while it is supported by a microphone stand. The overall background color green allows for the pink brain to pop, and I think that it looks aesthetically pleasing.
I used a website called Brand Crowd to enter the title, and the AI seemingly worked it’s magic and gave me hundreds of pages of logo ideas. I initially attempted to design one myself, but I got frustrated trying to use my nonexistent web design skills and leaned towards using a tool instead. Despite using AI, I think this logo looks quite nifty and is very fitting for our show.
