Composing the Archive

“Memory demands newness. You have to always update your archive” (Miller 113).

At the very opening of Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller argues that rhythm science is a “circular logic, a database logic” (4). What follows is a mash-up and mix of art, sound, philosophical, and cultural theories expounded with a loopy exuberance. The writing performs what it purports, detouring and turning back again in a celebration of sound as sense—personal, public, present, and historical.

Although Miller doesn’t specifically refer to database logic again, the logics he discusses blend into an amalgam—maybe, more properly, an algorithm—of ideas, not fixed, not linear. Especially not entropic. His is a generative world. Like the universe itself, there’s no center and no edge, just like the logic of a database. There’s movement, progression, digression, regression.

A rhythm scientist is an archivist of sound, text, and image, according to Miller (16). Implicitly, the archive itself is dynamic, not just its creator. And who is the creator of an archive, anyway? It’s not just the person who collects, but the person who uses the collection. There’s this built-in potentiality—stored energy—ready for an infinite carnival. Arhives (for Miller, his collection of recordings) serve as supplements to memory—vectors of memory and composition. We mix the archive. We compose it. We access the past though it and compose the future from it.

Paradox reigns in the world of rhythm science. Nothing is original, and yet everything is.

END OF POST

Sound Sources

Here are some links for sites that have sounds for free. I pulled all sorts of things for the sound clip in the post below this one (Sound Logic).

http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/index.html

http://www.grsites.com/sounds/

http://www.soundsnap.com/

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/PIRsfx.shtml

http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/

END OF POST

Sound Logic

Thinking about sound, I considered how sound could be used to construct a project like a visual argument. How could sound be used to argue, or in a broader sense, how can sound be used rhetorically? If we can create a visual argument in Photoshop, which takes a rhetorical stance with very few words, could we do the same with sound, using sound elements that are mostly not words?

I decided to see if I could create a short segment of sounds that had some sort of narrative—a beginning, middle, and end—so I am going with traditional linear narrative. I thought it would be a good way to learn to mix sound in Audacity. What I ended up with is more straight narrative, and not an argument—or rhetorical stance—at all, but the experiment taught me a few things.

I realized how much sound mixing must follow logical patterns. I’ll call it sound logic. For example, if you hear a person walking and opening a door, the choices of what to add next will create a story. Will the footsteps continue, suggesting the person has gone through the door? Will more footsteps be added to suggest another person has arrived? Will the door shut (another sound that would need to be added), and then the footsteps stop, suggesting the person went through the door and has left?

It makes me think of narrative points of view, which I’ve always thought of as visual, like the focalizer and focalized of narratology and film studies. We have the same things for sound—so, if the person I referred to above has gone through the door, and we now hear no more footsteps, we’re “listening” from the point of view of being inside the room with the door. We’re not “listening” from the point of view of the character.

I realize, though, that I can’t separate my thinking about how to construct sound for a narrative from visuals. I’m definitely privileging visuals, since when I created my experiment, I thought about what I was seeing in my head and used that to determine the logic.

To sum this post up, I’ll say it was really fun to make this, and I found some good sites I’ll post where I found free sounds. I hope you’ll listen to my creation, which is about 43 seconds long. Click below to hear:

IMPORTANT---it will loop when you click play, so there's a gap at the end after the door shuts!

http://www.box.net/shared/1t6oiuz0oo

END OF POST

GermanTechnoBuzz Remix

The sh*t song! I added a track with the woman's voice cut to just the word "sheize." I wanted that track to be a constant, but for variety, I changed her voice to a 25% lower pitch three times. So it's her original voice and then progressively lower three times on that track.

I wanted the beginning and ending the same.

At the end, the techno track goes away and leaves voices only. I put the woman's voice on all three tracks and overlapped them to make a maddening chorus...at least, that was what I was going for!

click to here it:

http://www.box.net/shared/py43bncowg

END OF POST

JamStudio Try Out

I have very little experience songwriting. JamStudio helps me do it. I played with it for ten minutes and wrote this song. Click to hear it, and once JamStudio's site pops up, hit the large play button in the left-middle of your screen. Fun!

http://www.jamstudio.com/Studio/FWSongShare.asp?SongNum=43159&SongId=43378

Bricolage and Gesamptkunstwerk

Re: Rickert, T., and Salvo, M. “The Distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, Worlding, and New Media Culture.” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 296-316.

Rickert and Salvo posit erasing the binary between real and virtual worlds altogether with their concept of “worlding.” The “prosumer”—a consumer + producer—participates in the creation of art. Romantic and Modernists privileging of the artists has morphed into a postmodern celebration of the audience as artist in the new media landscape the authors describe.

We’re at the beginnings of understanding how new media affects our perception of the world, according to Rickert and Salvo. Exploring our experiences with sound will help us understand “worlding” and how new media texts influence production and reception.

Rickert and Salvo argue that creative use of sound can offer new opportunities for invention in the composition classroom, a “bricolage-like aesthetic of merging different idioms, such as transforming noise into signal and finding new sources of input” (300). This idea of bricolage is vital to their argument, a “do-it-yourself” mantra that’s repeated in the online text we read (…And They Had Pro Tools at http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/rickert_salvo/start.htm).

It brought me back to a wiki entry that Katie and I made last semester on bricolage, available at http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Bricolage. In particular, we wrote that “[i]ntuitive thought processes, rather than reason, guide the bricoleur in his or her construction—the building of problem-solving,” and that bricolage “can be seen as a reaction to traditional—that is, masculine, empirical, and positivist—reasoning.”

END OF POST

Jam Studio

Last semester my classmate Diane Cook and I did a project on JamStudio in Texts and Technologies. I think the software provides virtually anyone the ability to compose a song, and I think it would be a way for us to make soundtracks for the movies we’re going to make for this class.

JamStudio jamstudio.com took the automated sound arranging program called Band-in-a-Box and combined it with the best of what Sony’s program called ACID and Apple’s Garage Band offered. Neither of the latter programs supported chords, and neither was online nor free. JamStudio remediates these older programs because how it’s written, in FLASH, which means it can run online without an install.

The program represents a stellar example of Web 2.0. The access benefits are that it’s free (and easy to use). A detraction would be if someone didn’t have computer equipment available or if they didn’t have high speed Internet.

JamStudio encourages play, an aspect of the rhetorical canon of invention. The user can add and subtract chords and various instruments easily, allowing for instant results; an arragy of choices allows the inventor to create and arrange which instruments, the number, and type of instrument. For example, the user can choose to have one acoustic and up to three electric guitars. Each electric guitar has 43 possible sounds to choose from, and the acoustic has twelve sounds.

The software also remediates the necessity of memorizing cords and their progressions. Memory is inseparable from improvisation, an important skill for a musician—JamStudio allows novices to improvise. It does the work of memory, in a way. Memory is related to kairos (context—place & time, audience, and culture).

Music is delivered via postings on the site, but delivery can occur in a multitude of sites--not only online in other online forums or web pages. A user has the potential to reach large audience and many people the creator does not know if s/he posts on the JamStudio forum, where s/he can get feedback.

Delivery can be public or private, as the user can put their work on MP3 devices or online. The song can be exported into and then edited with Audacity. After that, if you wanted, you could put the song on a site like Box.net and make your file into a link..

Overall, the program requires the user to be more computer-saavy than musically saavy. Musically, it is advantageous to know basic chord progressions, but not necessary to use Jamstudio to play around with chords and how they go together. It’s fun, too!

END OF POST

Talking about Talkuments

I wanted to try Audacity & Box.net. I tried to make a Talkument, and I didn't script it--tried to follow the advice of Shankar--so you get all the "ums" and natural pauses. I didn't use the microphone I have because it sounded like I was speaking from the bottom of a well...so you might catch my parrot in the background...

This is a little less than two minutes long:

http://www.box.net/shared/5ruj4iwkcc

Captivated by Capturing Sound

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and people were amazed and captivated by the capturing of sound. The ability to make something heretofore ephemeral into something permanent resulted in a paradigm shift in possibilities.

Now, over a century later, after innumerable sound recordings, we still face the “hierarchical relationship between written and spoken forms” (Shankar, 2006, p. 374). Likewise, Shipka (2006) remarks that a multimodal theory of composition does not take talk and writing as assumed starting points—and that we need to consider the potential of sound. Institutional traditions and power structures have (and still do) maintain written expression as the legitimate compositional form. What sorts of power shifts would have to occur for something like “spriting” to gain legitimacy?

Shankar (2006) observes that the “ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge” (p. 374). Yet, there was a brief time in American history when that wasn’t as true as it is now, during the “lyceum movement,” when lecturers traveled on circuits—people like Emerson—and people would attend the speeches for entertainment and self-edification. And here we are now at some sort of new industrial revolution, in which our media require new composition theory as we find new ways to entertain and educate ourselves and others.

END OF POST

Testing the Truncating

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it. Sigh. I really had wanted to do this for my Photoshop Remix, but it didn't work!! My guess is that because I copied and pasted from Word, I can't do it, and that maybe there are some tags I need to remove....which gets way over my head!

Photoshop Remix

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Men have become the tools of their tools” in the first chapter of Walden. Part of the genius of the statement, like with any great literature, is its adaptability to issues beyond its own time. Thoreau wrote the statement as part of a larger argument in Walden in which he lamented the detachment of man from nature. His thesis has lasting appeal, as people have continued to feel controlled by technological advancements. While my visual argument does not suggest that people need to contemplate nature as a cure for the modern (postmodern) condition, it does update Thoreau’s belief in a loss of control at the hands of our own creations. Whereas Thoreau lamented the railroad, I lament the laptop, among other things.

Janet H. Murray (2003) argues in “Inventing the Medium,” that scholars have not been “inventing the postmodern condition—they were merely chronicling it, registering and giving for to the cultural anxiety caused by the loss of faith in the great human meta-narratives of sacred and secular salvation” (p. 8). My argument attempts a visual expression of the cultural anxiety we feel from being tethered to our devices, such as cell phones, laptops, and navigation systems—even when we think they are helping us. The idea of being “wireless” masks the underlying understanding that we are actually totally “wired” most of the time and seldom set aside our technological toys.

While brainstorming ideas of ways to depict a person as “wired” to something that controlled him, I thought of a marionette with its strings held by an unseen hand, resulting in the central image in my argument. The original businessman image (from Adobe Stock Photos--at top of post) is funny, pathetic, and slightly disturbing. I chose this image from about five pictures of marionettes because of its humor and because it was easy to manipulate for my composition. The original picture does not have anything holding the strings, so I was able to cut and paste images of the “tools” I thought expressed the dilemma of modern man—and woman. I had to extend the length of the strings using the clone tool to make the scale look right, and I also used the liquefy/warp/pinch tool to make the strings look like they were moving. The image was fairly complete on a white background, but I thought that including the stage not only added dimensionality, but developed a metaphor of man as a puppet on a world stage.

I think simplicity is the composition’s greatest strength. The argument is immediately recognizable, which was my driving goal. While working, I kept repeating to myself the famous quote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” (Note—in class I attributed it to Oscar Wilde, but it is from Hamlet, which is rather far off the mark!) A visual argument’s strength relies on its ability to explain itself, which doesn’t mean that a reader shouldn’t be able to discover layered metaphors in a visual composition, but that less truly is more.

The composition’s weakness stems mostly from my newness to Photoshop. If I were more experienced, I would smooth the line between the man and the stage better. There is still something about the contrast at the top of the stage curtain and the foregrounded objects that I dislike, but I don’t have the skill to know how to fix it. I did adjust the contrast of the shadow in the curtain top, but I think adding the drop shadow to the man and strings part of the image was the greatest improvement I made to blending the layers.

I am especially pleased with how the keys turned out. I felt that I wanted to develop my visual metaphors beyond the man, the “tools,” and the stage, which for a while had me trying to make the fabric on the curtains look like binary code. A better choice, and easier, was to spell out the quote on computer keys. I started by making a blank key one from an image of a key in Adobe Stock Photos (at top of this post).

Now that the blank key is on this page without the text on it, I can see where I could have better blurred where I erased the original text on the key. I tried to use the burn tool there, but it became too dark. No matter, because in the final composition, the flaw is not noticeable. I chose the font on the keys to try to look as much like that on computer keys as I could. When I added Thoreau’s name below, I chose a font style that resembles an old typewriter’s style for contrast. Also, I added the date of the quote in order to comment on how these anxieties in our culture are far from new.

My project uses Photoshop to comment on cultural anxieties we all feel, a move which has implicit irony; I use a sophisticated medium (that caused me stress) to comment on the stress we feel from our technology. I felt this irony while creating my project, especially when I considered how Lev Manovich (2003) calls Photoshop the “key software application of postmodernism” (p. 24). Even more thought-provoking, Manovich (2003) warns that as

digital and network media rapidly become an omnipresent in our society, and as most artists come to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of become a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues—a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts. (p. 14-15)

My project, however, should not be relegated to a scholarly ghetto (though the voice in my head wonders if blogs are often just that). Even though my creative process was not at all similar to how I approach an essay, my argument is not irrelevant because it doesn’t depend on written text. While there are similarities to written composing in how I layer ideas and develop arguments, for the visual argument, I wanted immediate impact. I needed a completeness in my visual design that could be readily seen—which is not to say that a written composition does not also need immediate impact, but that with a visual composition, the impact must be felt by the audience much more quickly. My rhetorical choices depend on arrangement even more than a text-based argument would, and my argument’s authority depends on design. In sum, I used the same rhetorical canons as I would in a written text—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—but rely more on arrangement than I would have in a traditional essay.

References

Murray, J. H. (2003). Inventing the Medium. In The New Media Reader. Eds. Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Manovich, L. (2003). New Media from Borges to HTML. In The New Media Reader. Eds. Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

END OF POST

Truncating Posts

I'm no expert, but I will share my experience for anyone who wants to shorten posts and create a "more" link. I think blog pages look much better when they are streamlined, so I messed around with Blogger help and some hacker sites to give my posts a "read more" sort of feature.

Blogger Help has an article on Expanding Posts. The link won't work--probably because it's something a member uses...anyhow, here's how Blogger has it categorized if you want to search the HELP contents for how to do this:

How can I create expandable post summaries?

Thing is, like all of my experiences with this sort of thing, it didn't exactly work. I'm going to give you some tips if you decide to try it.

1. There was no "backup" button like Blogger said there was, so I copied and pasted it into Notepad in case I needed the original code. It turns out that there are only two changes, so when I messed up, I just deleted on the template and never did use the backup.

2. Tip: what came in VERY handy was you can hold down the CONTROL key and hit F the same way you do in Word to find the code you want! So, when the instructions say to find such and such, just search it. Still...see #3

3. I couldn't find where they were telling me to put the code, so I messed with different places, and found it would work if you put it after the part near the top where it has my template info after a dashed line. (Sorry, I couldn't put the example on this post because it would read the code!)

4. One HUGELY annoying thing you can't really help is that it's going to put the "read more" tag on every, single post, even the ones where you don't have more. The only fix is to type in END OF POST on your posts if they don't continue. I think it's crummy, but it is what it is. It's early in the semester, so I went ahead and edited my posts for it to be on all of them, but from now on I will have to remember to add it to short posts....OR, I can just expect that an interested person who clicks might find there's nothing more to see.

END OF POST

Interactivity, Participatory, and Sometimes Democratic

The common thread through the readings for this week ("Happenings," "Augmenting Human Intellect," "Sketchpad," "The Construction of Change," and "A File Structure for the Complex") concerns interactivity, or the level at which a creator/operator/user runs the machine. The readings point towards what we now call interactivity, which often leads to discussion of "participatory" enviroments allowed by new media--which at their best might allow democratic expressions, and at their worst might threaten privacy and safety.

But the writers for this week's readings weren't quite there yet, as precient as the essays are. The authors reveal the complexity of what we take for granted, and I realize how little I know when I'm confused by reading the most basic engineering theories.

I was especially interested by Ascott, who in "The Construction of Change" questions the relationship between knowlege and perception and how that plays out in art and science, and in how we organize information. Ascott even appears to predict how restructuring art (through technology) will lead to interdisciplinary ventures.

END OF POST

Automatons & New Media History

Since we've been reading about new media history, especially the idea of man in the machine (or machine in the man), I'd like to throw in a new topic, an automaton that was famous for nearly 80 years.

In 1769, the automaton debuted in Europe, von Kempelen's chess player. Audiences went wild over the automated chess player in its "lifetime," and notables who saw it included Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, among others. In the 19th-century, Poe wrote an article entitled "Maelzel's Chess Player" about the phenomenon. Poe used the terminology "pure machine" to indicate an apparatus that operated without the direct influence of a human operator--

Nothing has been written on this topic which can be considered as decisive — and accordingly we find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind. And such it would undoubtedly be, were they right in their supposition.

People were entranced by the idea of what they thought was a machine thinking. It turned out that there was a man hidden inside the contraption, which has been reconstructed in the more recent past.

There's a wikipedia article on it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

The Poe article is online at http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm

END OF POST

Tool of Their Tools

This is my Photoshop first draft, very rudimentary, but it's a start. I have quite a lot more I plan on doing to the fellow before I'm done with him. It gets my concept across.

END OF POST