First Attempts at Audacity Parts I & II

Part I

Okay, last week we worked with the Audacity program and a million free sounds. I loved it!! I am attempting to post my sound bite from class. I titled the sound bite 'waking up' I spliced a microphone tapping to begin, then a coffee pot perculating with some blues underneath, which eventually fades into a group of people talking. I played around with the multple layers for effect as well as fading in to certain parts. It is not Mozart but really fun to mess around with.

Part II

Okay so I couldn't figure it out, but I saw that "Silver" had a sound bite on his blog, so I will be asking him how to post sound. But in the attempts to figure this out, I had an idea for a class that I wanted to pursue. My vision is to teach an entire semester around composing with audio This American Life(sque)and then have the University radio station play them or at least the best ones, um contest style or something. I think Angela and I are attempting to pilot a "New Media" class, keep your fingers crossed.

Later that day

I think I want to start with a little background info. Both my BA and MA are in literature and there are a lot of new concepts, etc. for me to learn while focusing my PhD work on Comp / Rhet. During my last semester at Pittsburg State I needed to take a final seminar class and by cosmic circumstances I took a class on computers and composition. The class mainly dealt with the influence of computers in the field of composition, but it was in this class that I first read some of Cythinia Selfe's work, whose name is ubiquitous in the New Media field. I really enjoy her work and the first chapter of our text sets up a good theoretical base for the exploration of new media. Here is one of my favorite quotes: "The more channels students ( and writers generally) have to select from when composing and exchanging meaning, the more resources they have at their disposal for being successful communicators" (Selfe 3). In other words, ignoring the importance of "more channels" is essentially depriving students / writers of all the tools they need to complete a task. This leads me into the ideas that are expressed in the Daley article. I think that she makes a great argument for the use of multi-media projects in the class room. Daley says that "the tools of keying, compositing, and morphing are more than ways of misrepresenting the truth. They enable the construction of higher orders of meaning, nuance, and inference" (Daley 36). I am attempting to post a video that I think is funny, but also illustrates this point, enjoy.

Ummm...

Okay here is a short, hello I'm here post. I have started reading and thinking about the articles...more to come later. I will blame my lack of blogging to 650 pages of The Innocents Abroad, and its satiric travel log nature.