I can not believe we are already a quarter of the way through the semester. Week 4 was an interesting one. I’ve never put so much thought into the audio side of things. It was tough at first trying to figure out Audacity and also it was really annoying when any music mashup I uploaded to SoundCloud was removed because for copy right issues, but in the end I have learned a lot about audio and completed some cool assignments.
Daily Creates:
- Show Us A Feeling – for this daily create we had to upload a photo to flickr of a feeling and when I completed it at 11:15 pm I was tired so i made that my feeling
- Show us you favorite song in a picture – I did this one today because I forgot to do my second and also we had till midnight tonight to complete week 4 assignments so hopefully this will count. I chose the song Red Solo Cup by Toby Keith. I don’t have 1 favorite song I have a bunch. For this assignment it is my favorite song. I used some filters in Photoshop to give the picture a little different of a look so it wasn’t just a picture of a red solo cup.
Audio Assignments:
This was the most difficult part of the week mainly because I’ve never put so much effort in to audio specifically so it was all pretty new to me. Audacity was tough at first. Maybe they had tutorials that I could have done but I am a guy and I do not read instructions often. After a few hours of clicking buttons and figuring everything out I think I have a decent understanding of it. My only complaint about these assignments is I feel like the star system is not even between assignments. Two of my assignments was 2.5 stars and one was really time consuming to complete and the other took me 5 minutes max. Maybe there is a way to even out the star system but I don’t know.
- Movie As Radio (2.5 stars) – For this assignment I had to take the soundtrack from a movie and make a 10 minute max song of all of them. I chose the movie Toy Story 1 because it was one of my favorite movies from childhood. It took a while to get the songs off of YouTube and then deciding how much of each song to put in it was challenging. A lot of the soundtrack songs were just background music with no lyrics so I took some audio snippets form scenes to help tell the story of toy story. I could not upload it to SoundCloud because of copyright issues. If anyone has any ideas as to how to beat that rule let me know. Here is the Toy Story in under 10 minutes:
- Audio Quiz (2.5 Stars) – Many people did this assignment. It was pretty easy since Audacity has and effect that reverses the sound for you. I chose the song Temperature – Sean Paul. The hardest part was trying to figure out what song to do because I wanted it to be kind of tough but not impossible to solve.
- One Question (2 stars) – This assignment was fun to do. I had to choose an open ended question to ask people. I chose the question “Where would you study abroad if you could go anywhere and Why?” Since I was going to ask people on campus walk it needed to be one that is easy to ask and quick to answer. It was interesting hearing where people would like to go and why. Australia seems like the place to go now.
Jennifer Ralston Interview
The interview with Jennifer was very intriguing. I am not going to reflect on it too much since I already completed a reflection on it. I thought it was really cool that we actually got to hear from someone who worked on The Wire and many other shows and movies that a lot of us may have seen before. What I got most out of it was the importance of sound and how it is a very underrated part to any show or movie. It was an enjoyable interview and I can honestly say I know will listen to the sound differently.
First Live Tweeting
This week was first time I ever did live tweeting. I don’t tweet much but I did a lot during that hour of listening to an episode of the wire. Listening to the wire without video was different. When I went back and watched the episode there were a lot of scenes that I imagined differently while only listening to it. I am really excited for this week when we watch an episode without any sound. The tweeting was also kind of interesting because you got to see what other people were thinking of when they were listening to the sound.
Week 4 is in the books and now onto Week 5.
