Author: ktb300

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Audio Project- Kyra Bachman

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~ktb300/audio_project%202/

Description

Our intention for this project was to simulate a PSA style that brings awareness to an urgent issue in a creative way. The layout of the website has a clock in the center with various pollution-related photos in the background.  One the play button is pressed, a playful and light underbeat begins and each time the user presses the clock, it signals another the sound of a pollutant, will  new pollutant. The juxtaposition of the visuals with the mood of the sounds to portray the harmful effect of our seemingly inconsequential habits, i.e. motor  vehicles contributing to carbon emission and plastic bags. The clock symbolize people fixation on their daily routine, sometimes oblivious to the existential and pressing issues of the outside world.  Once the clock-hand reaches  12 am, sirens sound off signaling the final audio recording of a call to action. Users can then click on the clock and be routed to the UN Climate Action website. 

Process

We had originally planned for minimal interaction, but we learned from the test-run in class last Thursday that it was important add more interaction and visual elements for a better user experience and general understanding of the topic. I initially thought it would be cool to have minimal visuals, so the user would have to infer the meaning and then come to the surprising understanding in the end. However, that awakening ended up benefitting us immensely because our project is much more powerful and comprehensive than before. 

We gathered the majority of our audio using the TASCAM. All the sounds heard when the clock is clicked were recordings of things both Selina and I associate with being harmful to the environment. The other tunes heard underneath our gathered audios are from royalty-free websites. And lastly, gathered recordings from Donald Trump and Sir David Attenborough’s famous speech at a United Nations conference of December 2018. Our initial plan was to make one holistic audio, but we instead opted for interactivity by allowing the user to signal the audio by attaching separate audio ID’s to the sounds and their respective number of clicks. For the audio at the end, though, we did use audacity which was helpful in manipulating certain sounds.

I think the most difficult part of this project was the interactive audio portion. Because we have so many audios IDs and different layers of audio,  I really needed to pay close attention to the detail for the code to work. Although connecting the audio IDs to Javascript seems fairly concrete, it was easy to make a small mistake that would later be difficult to detect. 

Conclusion

I am overall very pleased with the outcome of this project. Both my partner and I were bit concerned about our project’s lack of interaction from the peer feedback we received last Thursday; however, this pushed us to reevaluate how we could improve the user experience, which helped strengthen the communication of this topic. 

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Week 6: “Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagarism”- Kyra Bachman

Jonathan Lethem offers an interesting perspective on the authenticity of artistic originality. Lethem notes what we consider to originality could often times be considered plagiarism. However, despite the negative connotation associated implied from ‘plagiarisms’ there are actually many benefits of the phenomenon of borrowing ideas. For example, works from Shakespeare were drawn from Plutarch’s life of Marc Antony, without the creation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, there would not have been Lenard Berstein’s West Side Story. These creations, as well as many others, exhibit the benign and even positive nature of gaining inspiration and borrowing from other authors’ works. 

However, this makes it difficult to distinguish inspiration from plagiarism and blurs the lines of what originality truly is. Seeing the benefits that ‘plagiarized’ pieces have provided to society, it seems counterproductive to diminish the value of certain work simply because it draws from themes of prior works. If an author creates something that is inspired by the works done by older authors, I see this as more of an extrapolation of a concept than a form of plagiarism. It may not be considered original in its entirety, but there are still new and original aspects of the piece. 

I like how Lethem compares the world of art to that of a public commons, explaining that “the world of art and culture is a vast commons.” I feel like there are certain universal themes, emotions, and topics that people will always draw upon — such as love, death, good vs. evil, coming of age, power and corruption, etc. It is the kind of shared human experience that brings people together through the arts and communication, especially in relation to these complex themes. It does not make something unoriginal for utilizing universal themes because no one has a monopoly on them. 

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Week 6: Homecoming Response- Kyra Bachman

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this podcast, especially how there is not one narrator and it is actually acted out. I would likely never choose to listen to the audio if I were also presented with the choices of a book or a movie. As a visual learner and someone with interest in visual arts— painting, drawing, photography,etc.— it feels strange listening to a dramatic dialogue that could be acted out in a movie or TV show. 

At first, I was confused with by the different background sounds and cutting between scenes, but as the story unfolded it started to make more sense and I realized the cuts between scenes was actually an interesting artistic choice. After considering the audio choices from directors standpoint, it makes more sense. because the story is being acted out without a narrator, the background noises are for a realistic listener experience.  Additionally, the absence of visual spectacle allows us to focus on the sound instead. The side conversation and interruption made the audio so realistic that at one point I thought this was an audio taken from a movie. I also feel like the crispness of the sound  enhanced  the authenticity podcast. I can hear every exasperated breath and voice intonation from the actors. 

The music incorporated in the podcast was also an element that helped drive the story. The placement of the solemn music in both the beginning and the end was a subtle element that made the audio more complete. The placement of the music in the beginning of the audio first suggests the mood of the plot to the listener and then hearing it again at the end reminds the listener of this same feeling in relation to what they’d just experienced from to the story. 

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Interactive Comic Project- Kyra Bachman & Kimmy Tanchay

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~ktb300/comic_project%203/

The Process

Our initial comic idea was a ‘circle-of-life’ scenario where the comic images would begin with the birth of two siblings, the duration of the comic would depict various stages of their lives including conflicts, and the end frame would just have one sibling left. However, after we began drafting image ideas we found that the ‘circle-of-life’ idea was a bit too ambitious for our coding and drawing abilities. Instead, we opted for our current idea that portrays a brother and sister’s path to adulthood. The comic begins at birth and ends when the older brother leaves for college. We felt that this would be the most authentic because this was a stage of our lives that we’d just experienced. 

For the animation portion, we first drew the visuals by hand and then traced over the images using Adobe Illustrator. We decided to use a simple color black-and-white color scheme with only sprinkles of color for emphasis. Our inspiration for this idea was the animations from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

Challenges

I found the coding aspect of this project to be the most difficult. Aside from the class exercise, I have never done such a large project that includes piecing together numerously connected and dependent elements from HTML, CSS, and Javascript. One aspect that I found unexpectedly difficult was adding all the images together in Javascript. We initially began by individually coding all our images together in Javascript with “else if” however we realized afterward that there is actually a much easier and efficient way. Additionally, one issue we faced was incorporating music in our webpage. We started out with several HTML pages but realized later that we had to put all of our code on one HTML page in order for the music to be coherent throughout the comic. 

The photo on the left is our first code which we had to repeat over 15 times and the second photo is after we discovered the more simple code.

At first, we had difficulty deciding what to include for our interactive element. We wanted to add different interactive elements other than buttons and Gifs. Our original idea was to create a drawing pad on one of the images, but we instead opted for what we did in frames four and five where the user can add bubbles and blocks to the respective images. 

Conclusion

Although I had many difficulties with the coding portion of this project, I feel like this project taught me a lot. A lot of the coding in this project required similar pieces, so the repetition was a helpful practice. Overall, I am actually very happy with how the project turned out. Despite the change from our original idea and challenges with coding and interaction, I feel like we still managed to follow through with everything we wanted to accomplish in this project while creating a light-hearted and relatable storyline.