Category Archives: spring25bond

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

⛈️BRain StoRM⛈️

I think it would be cool to create a show where a bunch of skeptical characters come together to create a show talking about nonsense stories related to AI. Like a panel of characters that would be very techno-pessimistic like my character Marie and the characters all sit down in a podcast like setting and review reddit stories of problems with AI and technology and put in their two cents with of course some disagreements along the way. Maybe even an inventor that is very techno-optimistic and would contribute to a good conversation and arguments for the technological side.

I think that Marie would be very anti-technologist because of how her husband passed (which is undisclosed for the moment and will be revealed at a later time). She also is a manager of a call center and corporate keeps trying to force an AI pre-screen for her customers to determine which department would best benefit them, but it will cost many workers their jobs and livelihoods. She would at the same time be open to learning more about different perspectives while holding strong to her beliefs. She is okay with technology (like the Daleks) in movies like Dr. Who but not in real life. I think her character would be very respectful of other characters point of views while adding very monotone jokes in the dialogue and provide stories that she has in her life. She may however provide some flat responses from time to time or get flustered when her point of view is proven wrong to much. I think that it will be very exciting to see how this comes to fruition in the coming weeks.

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

✍🏼Week of 2/5 – 2/9✍🏼

Let’s talk about it. This week forced me to get out of my comfort zone and experiment with audio storytelling. I was interested in starting my very own podcast previously but I didn’t really know where to start. This whole week was a learning experience that I did not take lightly. I am also trying a new format! Instead of trying to put together my whole week into one blog post and tell you a short creative process that leaves a lot out I am going to imbed the posts below so you can click them directly! I also added the creative process in each of the posts so you can see them individually as well as a whole. Update: I see that the posts don’t show fully, so I’ll adjust and add the creative process passage below it as a caption.

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Assignments from this week 📆 :

Anxiety on a Train ride

Behind the creation:
I was really intimidated by this project and using a new audio editing service, but I still wanted the outcome to be something I could be proud of. I didn’t want something that sounded like it was put together in three or less seconds and then tossed to the side, and instead something that would put you in a dream-like state as we discussed earlier this week in the videos we watched. I first started by compiling a list of sounds that I would normally hear on a bus or on a train like bags rustling, the train moving, low chatter. Then I added some other sounds that would give you the since of being frightened or tense like the creepy voice, and the beating heart. I was actually hanging out with someone towards the end of my editing which admittedly was time consuming, and they said that even they got tense listening to it and compared my audio to some of the horror movie sounds. A problem that I ran into was the fact that the audios, even though they were placed properly to be cohesive, were way too long for this assignment with a cap of 90 seconds. So, I had to meticulously go through each audio and adjust it to fit right and cut out unnecessary bits. I am really proud of the product and all in all this took me about a hour and a half to complete!

The Art of Voice

Behind the Creation: I first listened to the YouTube videos and took notes and then I compared them to the audio that we had to listen to. I re-listened to the YouTube videos a couple of times because they were short but detail-packed! I then went back in and edited my post to make sure that it was short and to the point to keep my readers entertained.

⛈BRain StoRM⛈

Behind the creation: For this, I went in with a strong idea of what my radio show would look like if it were up to me maybe a little too confident but I hope that this idea sounds interesting to the others and some would help bring this to life. I also thought about how she would interact with other characters and gave her a little more depth as a character so she isn’t as flat. I wanted to create a good idea of what I want so others if they see it on the ds106 website wouldn’t feel as intimidated to share theirs since I got this done a little earlier.

🎙Mic Check 🎙

Behind the creation: Mic checks 1…2…1…2… is this thing on? This was a really fun assignment where I created a radio bumper for ds106. For this, I briefly listened to the radio station and instantly decided on a lofi inspired background audio to match the “vibe” of the radio channel. While I wanted to focus on matching the vibe of the radio station, I wanted to make my radio bumper unique. Something that was uniquely inspired by my experiences. I started off by recording the audio bit of my voice which took three tries and thenI headed over to free audio.com and instantly searched for key words like lofi, radio bumper, Mellow beats, outro, intro, and other things of that nature.
I found some hip hop type intro sounds to stack on top of each other and even took a snippet of someone else’s podcast intro and added that to the beginning of the audio. I then trimmed my voice recording and added the reverb sound effect to give it a radio feel. Then I adjusted the intro sounds accordingly and added some lofi beats to the background. I then added the outro bit which is like a power down sound and began to edit out unwanted sounds and arranging the snippets into ways that went together cohesively. After I was done I realized that something was missing. I found a bit on free audio which said “Well on this show did you expect anything else?” which I felt was a great touch to add right after my voice. Then it was radio ready so I uploaded it… also I can’t figure out how to allow downloads, so if you want to use it I’ll send you the file, just ask!

Assignments from the bank 🏦:

A morning in Marie’s life☀✨

Behind the creation: For this assignment, I wanted to give you guys a little look at Marie’s life in the morning from coffee to her nap before work! I want to start by saying that this didn’t come out how I expected at all… I struggled to find sounds to use. IF I had the time, I would have recorded my own, but unfortunately, my schedule doesn’t allow for that. I will probably revisit this if I have more time later down the line. It was really fun mashing together different sounds and I enjoyed this! I have learned that with audio assignments it goes faster for me if I go through and brainstorm all the sounds that I want incorporated, search them up, and then drop them directly into Audacity. Then I start with my “starting sound(s)” and solo them so that I can only hear them, and adjust them as need be. I do this with all my sounds adding them slowly until I get the finished product!

STORY TIME

Behind the creation: For this assignment, I had to create a story and read it. So I decided to think about a story prompt that my character would come up with and put it into an AI generator. to get an idea of a story. I then edited it to make it seem more natural and like a children’s story. I then put the final product in a text-to-voice generator and selected a feminine voice.

A StOry THroUGh MuSIC

Behind the creator: Have you ever attended a musical production? Where there is nothing but music that tells a story. I recently attended a show like that last semester and thought that I’d take music and create a story. This assignment said to use new and old music to create a story but to avoid the SoundCloud police I used instrumentals. I copied and pasted a bunch of different sounds into audacity and created a story called broke music Box. In the beginning, the music box is playing nicely along with the music but the music box gets broken in the story and no longer functions well. I wanted to use this as symbolism for a tarnished innocence. In the back you can also hear birds that get silenced when the music box is broken. Listen down below.

Daily Creates:

Behind the creation: I always look at what others do for the TDC if I don’t know. While doing this today I noticed that people didn’t understand the prompt and I wanted to understand it so I clicked the related link and then added my response to mastodon.
Behind the creation: I just went with the flow for this one!
Behind the creation: As soon as I read the prompt I immediately thought about this lounge and magic bar hidden in a laundromat! So I submitted it.

In summary, this whole week I spent a long time figuring out what works best for me when creating audio projects. I learned that it is easier to brainstorm, compile, and then work in bits and pieces to make my life easier. While there were many upsides to this week there were also downsides, I had problems finding audio pieces that I wanted, and also scheduling out enough time to do these because of how time consuming they are. I also had problems with the software and learning how to segment play time and how to switch the orders of audio, but I quickly learned how to do so.

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Anxiety on a Train ride

/tags

Listen to my sound effect storytelling assignment below! For this, I tried to create the effect of having anxiety on a train ride and how overstimulating it can be for people with severe anxiety. Please enjoy and give me some tips down below!

Behind the creation:

I was really intimidated by this project and using a new audio editing service, but I still wanted the outcome to be something I could be proud of. I didn’t want something that sounded like it was put together in three or less seconds and then tossed to the side, and instead something that would put you in a dream-like state as we discussed earlier this week in the videos we watched. I first started by compiling a list of sounds that I would normally hear on a bus or on a train like bags rustling, the train moving, low chatter. Then I added some other sounds that would give you the since of being frightened or tense like the creepy voice, and the beating heart. I was actually hanging out with someone towards the end of my editing which admittedly was time consuming, and they said that even they got tense listening to it and compared my audio to some of the horror movie sounds. A problem that I ran into was the fact that the audios, even though they were placed properly to be cohesive, were way too long for this assignment with a cap of 90 seconds. So, I had to meticulously go through each audio and adjust it to fit right and cut out unnecessary bits. I am really proud of the product and all in all this took me about a hour and a half to complete!

Special note: I should have done the radio bumper first! This would have made this whole process easier and the bumper is less complicated! I guess you live and you learn!

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Take a Step Back and Relax

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.

So, what did we learn?

A police commander asking his men, "What did we learn?"

In working through the Middlebury assignment and visual and design assignment from the Assignment Bank, a few lessons and a few questions become apparent. We found pros and cons to AI image generators. Can we call what AI produces design? Is it art? I think no, because the decision-making processes at the heart of art and design are absent, and replaced by statistical averaging. Many years ago, one of my painting teachers, in critiquing the work of Bob Ross, defined art as “a constant process of exploration and discovery.” While there is exploration and discovery involved in playing with image generators, it’s not embodied in the products. It arises rather through the reflection on playing with the tools and evaluating the output. AI does sometimes produce something unexpected, which Bob Ross might call “happy accidents.” We could use those for inspiration and build upon them.

How is using AI to generate images different from copying existing images from the web? Aside from the copyright issues, of course. If we don’t build on AI-generated images, alter them or give them some context, did we really learn anything? Going forward, I think we should be using AI tools and products as a springboard or an enhancement, but to always work at making the output better, so it represents our work and our creative and aesthetic decision-making. And we should be sure to explain that decision-making process in our blog posts. To paraphrase a famous quote:

A poster image of JFK with the slogan, Ask not what AI can do for us, ask what we can do with AI.

Some things I’d like to highlight from the blogs this week:

 

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Seeing through Sound?

In my opinion, sound is a very important concept of storytelling. It can provoke any emotion, establish a setting, create suspension, advance a story’s plot develop characters, etc. Throughout the audio of “Moon Graffiti,” there is a lot of background audio for us to get a visual of the story that is being told. When the spaceship crashed we heard a tense sound to create tension, to make us be on the edge of our seats to wonder if they survived or want to know what happened. The two Radio Lab YouTube videos discuss audio storytelling and how people can tell stories without needing pictures or written words. Jad Abumrad mentions his version of storytelling, he uses his “voice”, he mentions he’s not comfortable doing that, so he uses audio clips to create the illusion that he is using his “voice” being able to capture the audience by sound and giving them the paintbrush to imagine the story is something magical, similar to putting the individual in a dream state mind. Jad Abumrad mentions that fewer images can be better for the audience because it influences the imagination that comes from the lack of images and abundance of sounds. Without images or written words, you can allow your voice/sounds to express a story in order to make the audience create the images in their mind, creating a sense of intimate connection with the storyteller.

While listening to the Moon Graffiti, I started to acknowledge that what Jad Abumrad mentioned in the video was correct. Listening to this audio clip I felt like I was able to watch them in a movie and feel their emotions. With the different audio and sounds playing while the story was being told it felt like I was in a dream state of mind, it felt like an eerie situation I was in. When they both went out of the ship to take pictures, I vividly could imagine them using their camera and seeing the flash every time I heard the click of the shutter going off. In addition, at the end of the audio with them reporting that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were not coming back to earth, it felt real, with radio static and the voice of the reporter, it created an unsettling mood and atmosphere, with the eerie audio playing behind his voice.

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Xander’s Triumphant Return to Civilization

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*.

dr oblivion is part cyborg now

Week 3 Summery

This week started off great. I had established a routine and was enjoying the daily creates. I had started draft pages for the assignments on my blog. I was organized! I was not going to be rushing at the end of the week to get it all done.

Then I fell.

I was walking to my car Tuesday night after class at about 7:25 pm I tripped on some uneven bricks and fell. My heavy backpack added to my instability, and I was unable to catch myself. I scraped my forehead on the brick walkway. In addition to the head injury, I also hurt both my knees and my right hand. It has made getting my work done quite difficult this week. I could not type Wednesday or Thursday. I was able to start typing Friday with many breaks. I am on Doctor’s orders to rest but I would rather not have to do 2 weeks of schoolwork in one week is all my classes, so I do what I can.

I did manage to do the reflection on design thoughts before I got hurt.

https://ds106.hurkledurkling.com/blog/reviews/design-thoughts/(opens in a new tab)

For some reason my UMW choose the week 3 email to go to junk. I just found it today (Friday). I had found a week 3 assignment list on the DS106 website that I was using. It was incomplete compared to the actual list. I may go back and re-do my design thoughts. I will have to see how much my hand can handle.

Here are links to my daily creates I made posts for in my blog.

Outsider Art – The Daily Create – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)

Daily Create Colour it in – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)

Cat on a Toilet – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)

#tdc4397 #ds106 Bark like a dog – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)

I did 4 but I had a personal goal of trying to do all of them. that will have to wait until my hand is better.

I was able to do the demystifying AI assignment.

Koala wearing a knitted hat – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)

Koala in a Knitted Hat – Part 2 – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)

I am having to really edit my thoughts with the sore hand. It is a challenge.

The four seasons visual assignment was fun. I decided to connect it to my character Lady Alice by showing where she grew up.

Four Seasons – Wyoming

Photo Blitz

Photo Blitz

my second assignment for the week.

PSA Evil Bricks!

It was a difficult week, and I did the best I could under the circumstances. I really enjoyed the process of making the PSA assignment. It was great using my accident as inspiration for my work. It was great making it something to laugh about. Now to get on with Week 4 work.