This is my secret entrance into my safe. I hide all my money and valuable objects in here. Usually the outside of the door is covered and blends in with its surrounding nature. However I took the door off for the picture.
Daily Create 2/8/24
Category Archives: spring25bond
Understanding Radio and Storytelling
During this week we had to watch two “starter” videos to make us start thinking about the radio and storytelling. During the first video:
I like how he was able to use words to create a picture into my head. He states that with radio they have to use co imaging to create the full experience. Connecting from this radio because one person has the voice and the other one or ones have the paint brush. The voice has many different styles like deep, high pitched, that voice than kind of leads off in sort of a question. He believes that radio will never die. I agree with everything he has to say throughout this video especially how the radio will never die.
The other video we had to watch was:
He states that a job as a storyteller is to make sure to create a circle of connections. The “good” story is in a kind of dream state which everyone wants to go or hear about. Now a days we have so many layers and weird noises. Abumrad mentions that the storytelling is from a very long time ago where it is ancient.
Daily Create 2/7/24
An airplane flag message is a great way to show many people a message you are trying to express. Many people use these flags as advertisements, marriage proposals, or a prank on their friend. However, if I had the opportunity to create a message I would ask for world peace. I think positivity can spread easily and this would be a great way to do so.
Weekly round up for Week 4!
Oh my, where do I start! Week four for me was Crazzzzyyy!! I do work for marketing at the dining hall at umw, and if anyone has seen or been all the events/dinners know they have been back to back and I can’t catch a breath! But I have been slowly working on my assignments this week! I was working every single night that the radio show listening was happening but I was able to save the link and listen but since I work at the fist floor at the UC, I get no signal down there so I wasn’t able to send any messages or hop on a call. I do feel bad about it but I hope everyone can understand my listening from a far! I really felt like I learned a lot this week, I felt so proud figuring out how to link my Sound Cloud to the bottom of my blog and my assignments are also on there!
All My Blog Post This Week
I think this week was a really impactful week to learn about audio. I’ve been having a great time learning about audio production this last week. Studying sound design, mixing music, and playing with sound effects has been exciting and fulfilling. Learning more about the technicalities of audio and its creative tools has been a joy. This week felt like a nice transition to my career to be able to know this kind of stuff. I hope everyone had a good week this week.
Weekly Summary #4
This was a pretty busy week getting to understand the audio stuff. By this time in the semester, I think we all can really feel the work starting to pile up. I like to start in number order usually with the assignments so got going with messing around with Audacity and put some on my personal SoundCloud account I already have had since middle school. I then went into the art of this audio making by watching the videos and listening to Moon Graffiti which was absolutely amazing. After that I figured I try making something myself and worked with Dr. Oblivion on that and also just googled around for sites on where and how to do that kind of stuff which will be cool to work on later on in the semester.
The ds106 radio wasn’t working for me (which was probably something on my part), but I went back with the help of Professor Bond and listened to the one on the Barnhouse effect which was super interesting. Then I worked on my sound bumper story which I kept basic and did brushing my teeth and using the bathroom in the morning. It was pretty difficult. I then commented on someone’s post about their radio show ideas and brainstormed some of my own in a blog post. After that I worked on 3 audio assignments which I actually didn’t see to include my character in which I wish I would’ve seen I think I would’ve done way better and cooler assignments. I then worked on the daily create for today and double checked everything and read quickly over next week. I’ll definitely start next week earlier and am excited for it.
Aggressive little technologies
So I wanted to play with the idea of Aggressive Technologies a little. I came up with a logo, using a font from Da Font and a silhouette of a war hammer. I should have noted which font I used, but… I thought the silhouette worked well. The angle and shapes suggest aggression, with a hint of rocket, and the font is similarly aggressive.
I asked Dr. Oblivion, “If a corporation called Aggressive Technologies were to promote its AI-based security and surveillance services to law enforcement agencies, how would they go about it?” and he responded with attitude.
Then I started playing with the animation script. What would happen if I uploaded something other than the train.mp4 video? I not-very-quickly found out that there is a strict 60 second limit for the video length. I trimmed a Bob Ross video to an appropriate length, and ended up giving him a lip-synced Oblivion voice. That was kind of weird, but not good enough.
I decided to play with ElevenLabs. I bit the bullet and paid them a dollar so I could clone a voice. This was ethically questionable, but like the Folk-RNN project, the questions occurred to me afterwards. In the meantime, I fed my cloned voice some text from The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and this gave me some ideas.
I imported my logo and my Bob clip into iMovie. I dropped the logo on Bob’s canvas and used the picture-in-picture setting to superimpose it. I had to adjust the size and position a little. It didn’t look right though, because the white background of the logo didn’t match the white of the canvas. So I imported the logo into Photopea, dropped out the background and exported it as a PNG file, which would preserve the transparency. Then I imported that into iMovie and it looked much better on the canvas. Originally I was just going to use it on the canvas close-up, but since the camera was stationary I could put it on the canvas in the rest of the video. I saved the video as aggrobob.mp4 and used it instead of the train.mp4 in the lip-syncing script, along with my cloned-voice file of the Manifesto excerpt. Interestingly, the script tried to lip sync the logo when Bob was off screen.
So I was getting somewhere. I brought my new video into iMovie, and dropped a piece of the old one over it to mask the canvas close-up lip-syncing. Dr. Oblivion had said something about celebrity endorsements, so I imported that video as well and inserted it in front of the other video. I put an mp3 of some ominous music underneath the Bob section. There’s a line through the middle of the sound tracks in iMovie that you can use to adjust volume. I boosted Bob to 224% and dropped the music to 6%, and saved the whole thing as an MP4, then uploaded to Youtube.
So it’s something, more of a learning experience than a planned project. Is it something that can be used as part of the Aggressive Technologies backstory? People can make of it what they will.
tennessee whiskey haunts andrea
This media assignment has two parts. First, edit a song to sound like it is playing from another room. The audio should sound muffled and the bass should be prominent. Here is an example of this effect and here is a tutorial on how to do this. The second part of this assignment is to write a weirdly specific description of your song. Here is an example of a description.
I did the Played From Another Room with Chris Stapleton’s Tennessee Whiskey and included my course character Andrea and her mortal enemy Georgia. You can listen to the song below while reading the description of the song being played in context and then read my walkthrough
Andrea stands outside her enemy’s office, dreading walking in and asking for help on a project. She would do anything to get out of this but her boss’ firm directions rebutted the idea which confirmed 2 things to Andrea. That her opponent might be starting to gain a foothold in the company and that Andrea needed to crush it as soon as possible. The longer she stands there the more tense she gets, only worsened by that song that keeps getting replayed again and again. Her foe’s music can be heard from behind the door, loud enough for Andrea to hear but quiet enough that no one else seems to, just like the scheming person behind the door. The sounds of a quiet melody being sung mix with the chatter in the building and the steps of Andrea’s coworkers as they pass by, some wave and make promises to meet up later at another event, while others spare her a sympathetic glance. At least some people aren’t fooled by this quiet menace. Finally, Andrea decides to bite the bullet and walk in with the confidence and superiority she was always graced with. She opens the door (skipping the knock to put her rival on edge and keep the upper hand) and braces herself for a ride from hell. “Georgia our boss sent me.”
I chose Tennessee Whiskey because I needed a song that made sense for Georgia to be playing. After looking at Wisconsin’s top songs charts I decided that this song would be perfect for Georgia. Especially during this time in their story when she’s had a hard couple of weeks dealing with Andrea with her legion of minions who listen to her every word, and she just needs a piece of her hometown with her.
To make the audio sound like it was coming from another room I watched the videos linked in the assignment about how it should sound and how to recreate those effects myself. Now I did have to figure out some terminology and use some slight guessing on some of the instructions as the video that teaches the effects is in another application and I’m just getting used to Audacity so I didn’t want to push it. But after doing a little bit of searching through the Audacity manual I was able to adjust the song. I primarily used the filter curve EQ effect and the distortion effect to achieve this sound like in the tutorial but then I added a little bit of reverb effect to really make the piece come together. Then I used the example in the assignment to write the description. Overall it was a learning process but definitely worth it.
ds106 Radio📻
by Greta Hammen
Listening to the story on the radio heightens your attention to hearing. You imagine, what item is making the sound and what is that sound adding to the story. I enjoyed getting caught up in it and also, thinking about how it was for people in the 50’s doing that in the evenings for entertainment. There is a contrast too, in how we live today and our entertainment, so the simplicity was a unique experience.
We are learning technology that will enable us to create a story for ds106radio and we all live in various places. We are bridging the gap between old and new in a fresh way.
Radio Bumper
I used Freesounds to find a guitar riff and added my voice over it to let the listeners know what they are listening to!
My Radio Bumper
I told Dr. Oblivion to excite the audience for what they are about to listen to and mention that it’s gonna be a ride. This is my first time using audio software and I’m really enjoying experimenting with different sounds. I kept the bumper simple because I want a baseline for what I can do with audio.