One of the assignments we were tasked with completing this semester was to live-listen to the DS106 radio station and give our thoughts on what we listened to. Specifically, we were told to talk about things like the sounds we hear, and how they tell a story. We were told to focus more on the sounds that we hear and how they drive the story rather than the dialogue that exists, if there was any. Keep reading to hear my thoughts!
So, after taking the time to listen to the radio station, I have a couple thoughts on what I listened to and how they relate to the field of audio storytelling.
One of the assignments for this week required us to come up with some ideas for an upcoming radio show with our course character and others as well. The upcoming radio show would involve the meeting and greeting of various course characters with mine and would discuss various topics on the show with other course characters. Everyone would participate and give their thoughts on the topic and the radio show would last for about 20-30 minutes.
One of the first ideas that I cam up with was to work with another course character by the name of Julius Lawrence. If you have not read about him yet, he is a highly successful investment banker who went to the University of Virginia to play basketball and study finance. He chose to follow his true dream and landed his dream job in finance. However, recently he announced that he is considering a transition to the NBA to follow his dream of also playing professional basketball. This got me thinking as how Xander and Julius could work together and maybe talk about an idea on their radio show. I came up with an idea that I really liked. Xander also made a big move in his life recently and became the very first human to implant a AI agent into his own brain. Since he was the first and Julius has a great mind when it comes to investments and finance, Julius could invest into Xander and his AI agent product. They would discuss how they would plan to start a new company for the AI agents and how they would go about actually constructing the necessary marketing, technologies, and ideas to make this idea come to fruition. They would also talk about why Julius was interested in a product like this and why he was so drawn to it.
Another possible idea that the two could discuss during their radio talk show would be the idea of AI and how it has become so rampant in everyday life throughout society. Xander, as a master in his field, would be able to drop his thoughts on the subject, and Julius who is not directly related to the field but also works in a field when AI could very much be integrated into, could talk about his thoughts on the subject matter. The two could also discuss if AI poses a threat to everyday life in society or if it will produce more good than bad and how it could be beneficial or detrimental to the real world. By having this conversation, viewers could potentially listen to both sides of the argument as Xander would advocate for AI due to the AI agent in his brain, whereas Julius’s ideas may be more contradictory. It would definitely be an interesting meeting between the two and whatever they end up discussing in their radio show, it will for sure draw a crowd. I am looking forward for the two to meet and have a short discussion about whatever we decide the topic ends up being and everyone will be looking forward to their thoughts. Be on the lookout for the radio show, coming to a radio station near you!
The final assignment that I chose to do for this weeks three audio assignments was to create a spooky sound clip consisting of at least 4 different sounds. As a result, I came up with a final product that you can listen to below which consists of 5 different sounds. The sounds are a scream, a woman laughing eerily, a person walking through the woods, a regular ghastly sound, and finally the roar of various monsters. The monster noises come in closer to the end because that is where the sound lightens up a little bit and there is only one other sound clip being played. The clip starts with a man screaming and then the woman starting to laugh like crazy so that it sounds like the woman is after the man. Then the ghastly forest sounds come into the picture and that is being played in the background as well as the woman continues laughing. Finally, the clip of a person walking through a spooky forest with ominous sounds is being played in the background as well. I enjoyed making this sound as it allowed me to toy with different sounds and see which sounds paired together well and which ones did not pair that well. Also, the monster noises were a last minute addition because I felt the end of the sound clip was a bit bare and by adding some more rustling and growling, it would make the sound scarier and it did. I was happy with the final product that I came up with and like stated before, enjoyed creating this piece. I think in the future I would try and experiment with actually regulating the sound clips, meaning like adding reverb or amplifying certain parts to make it more dramatic, but for now, I chose to keep it a little more simple and just do what was within my limits.
The second assignment I chose to do for the three audio assignments this week was to create a relaxing and soothing sound that one could fall asleep to, if they wanted. So, I went ahead and started browsing through some of the sounds available on freesound.org and tried to locate some calming sounds that I could put together to create one big audio clip. I wanted to include various sounds such as chimes, waterfalls, rainfall, animals, nature, etc. Luckily, I was able to get almost all of the sounds that I wanted to incorporate, into the final audio clip. As you will hear in the sound bite, I started off by taking all of the four sounds and having them play at the same time, overlapping one another. For the chimes, I decided that it was too overpowering for the rest of the sounds that were being used so I decided to just let those play every 10 seconds and then the time when they were not playing would be filled up by the remaining sounds that were being played. I chose to use the sounds of wind chimes, soft rainfall, a slow waterfall, as well as the chimes and chirps from birds in a rural countryside. I think all of these sounds blend in really well and allow the listener to try and pick apart the different sounds and try to decipher what is what. Also, none of the sounds are too overwhelming so the listener is not overstimulated by the same sound. Also, in the sound clip that contains the rural countryside there is a train horn that is being sounded way off in the distance which I personally really liked. I thought the addition of the train horn in the distance really added to the relaxing nature of the sound clip because the horn would sometimes be played when all of the other sound bites were coming down from their climax, so it would not be dead silence, rather a subtle horn that one could hear off in the distance and still be stimulated by the various sounds as they begin to climax once again. Also, the train horn was nowhere near too loud for this clip either and you could even hear the nature that was captured in tis clip over the train horn and really enjoyed the birds chirping while the horn was being sounded. I would say that my favorite sound clip used to create this entire piece would have to be the sound clip that had the train horn, soft wind rustling, and the birds chirping in the background because on its own, that could be a relaxing clip I could listen to all day. Take a listen to my final product, which you can listen to below.
One of the tasks for this week was to complete 3 audio assignments from the assignment bank apart from the sound effect story and the radio bumper. So, for my first assignment I decided to create a breaking new video with some text-to-speech video generation techniques with the addition of using a AI generated image to fit the theme of the class as well. The assignment also stated that we should include our course characters into the assignments as we go so I decided, why not give Xander a return the general public with a breaking news update. It has been a while since we got to check in with Xander and I am happy to report that he has been up to some big things recently. I could tell you but I could also just show you, take a quick look at this breaking news story that covered what Xander has been up to over the last couple of months.
As I am sure you all saw, Xander became the first human in the world to have an AI agent working simultaneously with his brain causing his brain power to almost double. This news is being released after Xander has been with the agent in his brain for about 5 weeks so he is well past his rehabilitation point and is onto full-blown performance testing now. As of recent, there have been no issues with his chip and he feels the same, however, he does say that every know and then he just gets a big rush of knowledge and that it is hard to explain. However, he constantly reinforces the fact that there have been zero negative side effects or consequences of this chip so far and stresses that to everyone who looks at him as a egotistical mastermind.
I really enjoyed creating this breaking news update because I have never done something like this before. It has always been with image generation but never with video generation and it cool to figure out how everything worked and what you could and could not do with a tool like this. The background image was an AI generated image, which actually took me a while to generate because the chatbot was not properly following my prompts and kept giving me random outputs that did not match my prompt but other than that, that part was pretty easy. I then found an professional looking avatar and added him into it so that he could act as my news anchor. Once I did that, I just needed to give it a short script to read as my text-to-speech requirement was being fulfilled while also finishing up the main chunk of the assignment.
P.S. Stay tuned, I think Xander has something big up his sleeve with another character in this class *wink wink*.
One the assignments that we got to do this week was to create a sound effect story. This means that we had to create a short (less than 90 seconds) sound clip that tells a story. I have my sound effect story uploaded to my SoundCloud and you can find it below. At times, I noticed that sometimes the sounds were a little difficult to make out. That is one thing that really interested me, because while telling a story is so easy with words, it becomes a lot more difficult when the only thing you can use is sounds because those sounds need to be so precise in order to try and convey the message you are trying to explain. The basic idea of my sound effect story was about a man who was driving down a slick, icy road and his car had spun out and he had crashed into a ditch. The clip starts off with wind howling to try and portray the idea that the person was moving fast and then a car crash sound comes in. Once that happens, the man walks on snow, which can be heard through the crunching snow sound clip, and then finds a cabin. He opens the door, which can once again be heard and then he starts a fire with the crackling in the background. He then begins to make himself a cup of tea which you can hear him pour it and then proceeds to take a shower because he is all dirty and cold from the walk to the cabin, which can also be heard at the end of the sound clip. That is as far as my story goes for right now and I liked the ending because it leaves a mysterious atmosphere around because you do not really know what happened to the man or if he got help. I enjoyed doing this assignment and it was cool to see how the different sounds could come together to make one final product that told a story.
This week i got the chance to experiment with various sounds and the Audacity program. One of the first things that I did was create a radio bumper for the 106.1 radio station. I picked this station because it is in line with the DS106 tag line and also is a radio station that I always listened to growing up. I decided in order to create the radio bumper, I first needed to decide what kinds of sounds and music the radio would play, and so I decided on pop, rap, country, and the current top hits in the country. This was just like the actual radio station I used to listen to and it had a good overview of different songs to keep people interested. Like any radio station, I also decided to add the tag line “exclusive interviews” in my radio bumper to attract even more people. You can find the radio bumper that I created at the link below.
This week went by a little quicker than last week in my opinion. I started off the week by getting my first daily create done which you can find here. This daily create basically asked us to create a saying or phrase of a dog barking but in cat talk. This was a little confusing to me and so my answer was pretty simple and just revolved around translating various dog sounds to “meow.” I also was able to do my second of three daily creates for this week which was to create an image of what a cat might take a photo of on the other side, it is a little hard to explain but click on this link to find it. Finally, my last daily create for this week is located here and involved us using Google for a coloring book experiment. You had to try and color in the picture from memory using the different colors available to you. It actually proved to be somewhat difficult and I thought it would be much easier. Once I finished that, I moved onto working on the assignment bank assignments and I started with the Middlebury Art Challenge. I actually really enjoyed working on this assignment because it was interesting to see how image generators would react when being given different prompts and I really enjoyed looking at the outputs. Although this assignment took me a little while, I thought it was worth it because it really allowed me to see how my prompts affected the outcomes of the image generators. I found out that small changes in the prompt do indeed have pretty big impacts on what the image generators can create once the prompts are changed. Moving on, I did the next two assignments for the assignment bank tasks within the visual and design fields. My first one was a visual assignment that required me to create a collage of the seasons in a single area, and I chose to do mine in Central Park, New York. I created this using a collage maker and really enjoyed finding the pictures and looking at the different sceneries in the area. My final assignment bank task was to create a magazine cover for my course character, Xander Neoteric. This magazine cover was created using an AI image generator and I really like the look and feel of the magazine cover. It truly brings out the tech side of Xander and from the font and color really shows that this guy loves the field of technology. I also spent some time everyday this week to comment on people’s post to make sure that everyone is getting some positive feedback on their work so that they do not feel like they are doing it for nothing. I also enjoy just looking at other people’s work to see what everyone came up with. I also was able to create this photoblitz this week as one of my assignments as well. The photoblitz required me to take seven prompts and associate each prompt with a photo that I took to try and match the photo with the prompt. I was given 20 minutes to complete as many of the seven prompts that I could and fortunately, I was able to finish them all. You can find my photoblitz at the link given above. Like stated in that blog post, I enjoyed completing this assignment because it allowed me to be more creative and intentional with the photos and work that I was doing. I also created a post that talks about some things that I learned while watching the interview that was linked on the assignment page along with the other youtube videos that were linked as well. I enjoyed this assignment because it gave me a better insight of what was happening in the world of film and books in regards to movie posters and book covers.
I did not encounter too many issues this week when completing my assignments. I thought things went pretty smoothly this week and I enjoyed doing all of the assignments. The only issue that I can really think of was like last week, my WordPress site would sometimes not load, but again, there were resolved almost immediately, and did not cause any big issues. Like stated before, I really enjoyed the Middlebury Art Challenge because I was interested to see how the image generators would generate the different pictures based on the different prompts.
I definitely think that I accomplished all of the requirements for all of the assignments for this week and I think I did them to the best of my ability. Like stated before, I enjoyed most of the assignments for this week and really allowed me to be creative and intentional with the work I was doing. I would not do anything differently for the work that I did this week as it was completed with effort, time, and creativeness. I believe that there are no larger issues at hand with my work. I think that the assignments were done properly and with effort. I do not have any further questions at this time for the class.
Above, you can see the different tasks that I had to do when accomplishing my photoblitz. I enjoyed going around and trying to find various pictures that fit the scheme of the prompt. To start off, I had to take a picture of the website itself to show the start and end time for the time spent working on the prompts. Those are pictured below, and as you can see from the time I started and the time I finished it took me about 18 minutes to complete. Now I want to take some time to go through the pictures that I took and why I chose them for each prompt.
Starting with the “Make it green: green sleeves, green with envy, green eggs and ham” prompt, I took a minute to think to myself what the prompt really wanted me to do and after a minute I decided to just take a picture with almost the entirety of it being covered with some shade of green. The following picture is used to represent the various things that I used to make the picture seem “green.” As you can see, I was able to find different items around my room that had different shades of green to throw some contrast in there. There are four tennis rackets with a very deep shade of green contrasting with two pieces of clothing that are also different shades of green as well. The one on the left is lighter while the one on the right is a darker shade. In the background, there is also a blanket that has more earthy, green tones to it that was used to cover up any extra space to fill the picture in with more green.
Moving on, the next prompt talked about taking a picture that involved you favorite color. This one was fairly simple, and since my favorite color was red, I decided to take a picture of my tennis bag that is very much bright red. This picture can be seen below.
My next prompt was to take a picture of a piece of fabric or clothing that has an interesting design or texture. As a result, i decided to take a picture of the following polo that I recently bought. This article of clothing fit the description perfectly in my opinion because of the different lines, textures, and shapes that are present on the t-shirt. As you can see, there is a very palleted design, meaning that it looks like there are different “heights” and “depths” to the t-shirt giving it a very cool design to look at. Also, the various lines and triangles that are used on the piece are also very cool to look at and make the t-shirt look and feel better when wearing it. One last design aspect that I thought made it perfect for this prompt was that when the t-shirt is just hanging as it is in the photo, it appears that all of the triangles and lines are converging to one center point at the bottom of the t-shirt which I thought was cool as well.
My fourth prompt was to take a picture of something that measures things. Now I think most people would go and take a picture of a tape measure or ruler, however, I did not have access to either of those items. Therefore, after walking around my apartment for a couple minutes, I decided to take a picture of my thermostat. This, in my opinion, still fits the description because it is measuring the temperature in my apartment as time goes on similar to measuring the height of a tree using a ruler or other measurement device. That image is pictured below.
Moving on, my fifth prompt was the one that talks about a picture of someone’s shoes. I decided to take a picture of the shoes that I have now had for over 2 years. This is because this was the first pair of shoes that I was able to purchase with my own money. I never worked a job in high school, and so having the ability to make some money during college and buy my first pair of shoes was pretty nice to experience. Those shoes are pictured below and you can definitely tell that they have been put through the wringer.
The next prompt was probably the toughest prompt for me to accomplish, however, I do have two pictures that could possibly work for this prompt. This prompt involved finding a picture of a advertisement that was painted onto the side of a building. One of the pictures is on the left hand side and that is a picture of a sticker that has been pasted onto the wall in my living room talking about protecting the walls. The one of the right hand side is a mural of Kobe Bryant that was painted on the side of the building in Los Angeles, California. As you can see, the image on the left is closest I could get to an advertisement because there is nothing on the side of my apartment complex. It says what materials are okay to use on the walls and what items are not okay on the walls and advertises them visually as well. On the right hand side, it is not an advertisement per say, rather an image of a great basketball player and the legacy that he left behind. It is a picture of Kobe Bryant next to a Black Mamba, as that was his nickname during his time in the NBA and after he retired. Again, not necessarily an advertisement, but a visual representation of the legacy of one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
My final prompt was to take a picture of something that was growing. This prompt is pretty self-explanatory in my opinion and so I decided to just take the simple route on this prompt. I just decided to take a picture of the forest area near my apartment complex which shows an abundance of trees that have grown and the small branches that are continuing to grow and flourish as the Spring season rolls around. That image can be found below.
I enjoyed completing this assignment because it allowed me to be a little more creative some of my prompts and the images that I chose to use for those prompts. Some I went the more simple route but some of them also required me to be a little more thoughtful about the image that I was using such as the thermostat and the picture of something being advertised on the side of a building. Overall, I really enjoyed completing this assignment and am very excited to see what everyone else in the class got the chance to come up with.
One of the assignments for this week was from Middlebury College and we were tasked with creating a strange picture using two different AI chatbots and compare our results. I took this assignment step-by-step and have three different versions of each step. So, my initial step was to just asked the two chatbots, DALLE-3 from OpenAI and SDXL Turbo from StabilityAI to give me a picture of a superhero. I was very open-ended with my question here and as we can see I got two very different results. On the left hand side, I got an image of a superhero that appears to have three legs and two capes and a mask that looks like the one Star-Lord wears in the Marvel franchise. It is hard to tell if this is where the inspiration for the image was drawn from because the colors of the suit and mask are very similar to that of Star-Lord. On the right hand side, we see a more typical superhero costume and an image that resembles that of Superman. We can see the differences from the two different AI chatbots and how one (OpenAI) is more realistic in terms of the picture quality and then the SDXL Turbo is more cartoonish when it comes to the picture quality. Moving on, I decided to add some more details to the prompts to try and figure out what the chatbots would output.
The next step of the design challenge was to add some flair to the images and see what you could create with the different chatbots that you chose. So, I decided to ask the chatbots to give me an image of each of the heroes that they generated in my previous prompt and have them standing on top of a rock with one leg being shown to be higher than the other like some heroes stand in movies. On the left, the image was generated by DALLE-3 and as you can see, it was pretty accurate with what I asked for and what I got. The image on the right is a little more obscure because it did not have the hero have one leg higher than another, however, it did have them standing on a rock facing the world and it also appears to have added some extra people in the back even though I did not ask for it. Also, the face on the superhero on the right looks to be a little more obscure as well and does not seem to be fully generated. Finally, I made one last request to the chatbots and that will be shown and explained down below.
Here the prompt for the chatbots was to create an image that had a superhero riding a cat on the moon. As a result, on the left, we can see that ChatGPT did a great job of creating the image that I requested and looks very nice overall. However, on the right hand side we see the SDXL Turbo output which was also tasked with the same job which was to create a picture of a superhero riding a cat over the moon. For some reason, this chatbot decided to ignore the “on the moon” part of my prompt and instead have the superhero ride the car in some random city. Also, this chatbot also decided to create a superhero that was a mix of both superman and batman and not just use the same costume throughout so that was interesting to see as well. Overall, the quality of the SDXL Turbo pictures were much worse than that of ChatGPT’s and ChatGPT was also able to be more accurate with its output and they were more appealing to look at.
I would say that the image on the right hand side was the worst image I got because it was not really that close to what I was asking for. I asked for a superhero riding a cat on the moon and I got a man dressed up as two different superheroes riding a cat in some random city. That is what I think that one was the worst because the output that I got was not what I really wanted at all. I would describe what I got as a child taking in instructions and only paying attention to half of the instructions. On a more positive note, the picture below I thought was the most impressive. I really liked how this one ended up turning out. I just think my simplicity of the prompt honestly made it easier for ChatGPT to interpret and output an image that was exactly what I wanted. Also, the sun in the background that is setting and the cape flying in the back is all extra from what I asked for and it just comes together to create the perfect image. One of the reflection questions in the assignment description talked about how AI may pose a threat to artists and where I think it would affect them. I think that AI poses a pretty serious threat to artists because whatever artists are creating, AI can create the same thing, if not better, in almost no time while also making it accessible to everyone immediately. Therefore, I think that AI will definitely pose a threat in the future because AI will take that sense of creativity away from artists because whatever they make, AI can also make. When creativity is lost, it is very hard to make interesting content so it makes sense that artists might struggle in the future.
