Category Archives: Audio Reflection

Moon Graffiti

As I am listening to Moon Graffiti, I am paying close attention to the various types of sounds. Sound drives stories by setting the atmosphere, show emotions, develop characters, structure narratives, foreshadow events, engage the audience, and influence the pace. Sound also impacts the mood and creates an atmosphere by using elements such as music, noises, and sound effects to create specific emotions and set the tone of a scene. The intro, almost immediate you get a sense of something gone wrong. The loud beeping noises, the increase in volume of the voices, and the crashing sounds all hint towards a sign of something gone wrong. The switch from a clear audio to a more static audio gives the impression that now Armstrong and Aldrin are talking to us through their helmets. Little details like this can make any audio recording go from boring to interesting. It also can give the effect that you’re experiencing whatever is going on in the recording in real life.

Going back to Abumrad’s video he claims “…the human voice has so much information the vibrations of the voice the way the voices rise and falls…” We can see some of these traits in Armstrong and Aldrin’s conversation thought the recording. You can tell when they’re calm, excited, or concerned. The human voice is a key piece to any form of audio. It can give a whole new perspective without you even realizing.

Echo: An Audio Reflection

This post is about the videos we were assigned to watch as well as the moon graffiti story and the ds106 radio broadcast.

After watching the two videos from Jad Abumrad, I have a little bit deeper appreciation for radio/storytelling. The videos talking about how pictureless storytellers are like modern day shaman and they are creating empathy between listeners is an interesting thought. Until you really break down what is happening when a group is listening to a story, you don’t really think about it. You don’t think about anyone else’s experience because you are lost in your own. But really, you are all sort of sharing an imagination, an ethereal plane of thought, perhaps a consciousness, where all the experiences are similar but different based on the personal interpretations. Conceptually this was very interesting to me.

The moon graffiti audio story was compelling. I was hooked from the second I read the premise. I really like how they used a real speech from the national archives to create this story. The ambiance and music created horror like tension combined with intense depression for the fictional fate of our heroes. Th accuracy of their language and actions they may have taken really immersed me in their plight. To think that they were prepared for something like this to happen is eerie. Imagine if it did? When they mention that this mistake makes have killed the space program. Maybe it would have made it move faster. It is interesting to think how history could have changed whit one tweak.

The ds106 group listen event was really cool, especially after watching the Jad Abumrad videos. I was thinking the whole time that we were all experiencing the same thing with slight tweaks based on our experiences and were in this like shared dream state. All of us could be sitting there with our eyes closed imagining the environment in which the story was being held in. The sounds, the music, the dialogue, all telling a story I am familiar with, but it somehow seemed more intimate, even visceral. That Jad Abumrad guy really knows what he is talking about. I hope to sit in on the next part if I get back from my other class on time.

I don’t really have much more to say about these things other than I really enjoyed them and it got me thinking about how to do my assignments this week and how I should try to invoke feelings with my audio design.