Tag Archives: audio

Assessments, Networked Media

Audio post

This is a track I found on Soundcloud published under a Creative Commons license. The song is “Sock It To Them” by Paul Flint.

There are many ways to post music online. I’ve chosen to post a Soundcloud track because of the ease of embedding it into a WordPress post, but I could have just as easily used music from Bandcamp or even uploaded an audio file directly and presented it to the reader using a media player plugin.

Embedding media poses some interesting questions around ownership and copyright. For example, if the track I posted was a copyright track instead of Creative Commons, am I legally responsible for infringing copyright by posting it to my blog, or is Soundcloud responsible because they made it available in the first place and are hosting the audio file? Or is the person who originally uploaded the infringing track to Soundcloud?

This is another case where it’s best to stick to the public domain, Creative Commons or work I’ve created myself.

Standard
Media 1, Workshops

Week 4 Exercise: Favourite Place on Campus

In this week’s Workshop we used the ZOOM H2N audio recorder to make a short audio piece and familiarise ourselves with the equipment and process for editing sound.

We were extremely constrained by time and barely managed to record any sound at all, but I managed to layer what we got into a (simple) piece in which I discuss my favourite place to sit and chill on campus. There are three layers of audio in this piece.

Editing sound is something I’ve done in the past (see my podcast here) so I didn’t learn too much from the editing part of this exercise, but it was good to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the ZOOM recorder for future reference.

Standard
Lectorials, Media 1

Affordances

Affordances: the specific and unique attributes or functions of a medium.

It’s interesting to think about what makes a particular medium suited for some stories but not others. In this week’s lectorial we discussed how sound has a particular set of attributes because sound reception is a psychological process interpreting physical vibrations:

  1. Sound is physical – you feel it (e.g. low sounds can make you uncomfortable)
  2. It provides precise spatial and directional information
  3. It can be a very intimate form of communication – because you feel it can communicate very delicate personal information (e.g. whisper)
  4. Often portable – you can be doing other things while listening to sound

This got me thinking about what the affordances of other media might be.

Podcasts

  1. Use sound’s intimacy to tell human stories – it’s right in your ear
  2. Portable, can be used when driving or doing housework etc. (This could also be a weakness as it allows for a less attentive audience.)
  3. Major weakness is that it can’t use visual accompaniment in any way

Live television

  1. A shared experience between communities, either in the studio audience or in society at large (e.g. event television)
  2. Allows for “wow” moments, unplanned or surprise experiences
  3. At the mercy of the live participants, so resulting quality can be inconsistent

Long-form magazine articles

  1. Can use (and edit) quotes to steer a reader’s point of view to the story
  2. Text can compensate for low quality audio recording, as the legibility of the speaker isn’t an issue
  3. Allows deep focus – reading an article is the only activity that can be done at that time

Comedy/spoken word performance

  1. Like a written story but speaker can use cadence and emphasis to add colour
  2. Live audience feedback is contagious and concentrates reactions

There are obviously many, many more affordances that could be listed for these and other media, and hopefully we get a chance to work with some of these types of content in future workshops.

Standard