Author: Shirley Liu

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~zc1151/commLab/AudioProject/intro.html

Background:

Click the link above to view our Audio Project. I worked with Cecilia to create a story about a man who has lost his glasses but is still hungry and decides to make pancakes without them. The problem we ran into at first was figuring out what to make the project about. I had seen some cooking ASMR videos on youtube and really liked how the video focused on the comforting sounds of the cooking. I really admired how minimalistic the videos were as well.  We had many ideas ranging from creating a project in the perspective of a cook who had a visual disability. However, we soon realized that her sense of touch is what guided her around the kitchen and not so much the sounds of the ingredients. We still wanted to create a story so we came up with a guy who broke his glasses and needed to cook pancakes. We intentionally blurred the pictures to show that the guy did not have perfect vision and had to use sound to get around. 

Process:

For the visual aspect of the project, Cecilia made an outline of different clips that we might need. I used an iPad with an Apple Pencil to draw the different scenes of the story. As for the collecting the audio, I went to my room to record in order to ensure there was not too much background noise. I took my mixing bowl along with the other ingredients such as the eggs and flour to make the pancakes. We used the tascam along with the microphone to record the different sounds. Some of the audio files came out nice and clear but others were too quiet. For example, the dropping of the flour sound was very quiet and delicate so we decided to use Audacity to amplify them. However, after removing the background noise and highlighting the flour sounds, it became kind of staticky and unrealistic. I could not think of anything that could  mimic the sound. However, later on it was mentioned that through FOLY, we could have tried punching a pillow to imitate the sound of flour dropping into the bowl. For other sounds such as the one we used at the end with the delicious scene, we found on an open source website called http://freesound.org.  These clips were edited and then used in our project. 

I worked on building the foundation for the introduction page which included creating a function to mimic the effects of a typewriter. I think it allowed for us to set up a story type setting/mood. Cecilia mainly handled the coding part of the project as she put together the functions for navigating around the project. She figured out how to allow the reader to click items to progress through the story and how to integrate sounds along with the changing of the pictures.

Conclusion:

Overall, I had a great time working on this project because it allowed me to explore a new area of interest that I never worked with, audio. I enjoyed learning how to use the recorder, the microphone, and the audio editing software as well. Partner contribution was distributed evenly and I am very happy with the end result. Cecilia handled the editing and mending of the whole project while I compiled the materials for the drawing and audio aspect of the project. 

Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence” raises an interesting idea revolving around plagiarism. The many examples provided by Lethem all play a role in showing how much plagiarism affects today’s artworks. He continues to claim that taking an aspect from one artist’s work to include in your own is furthering the advancement of society. However, many see this as plagiarism and copyright infringement. The line between influence and plagiarism is not drawn too clearly. One question I want to raise is who determines what is plagiarism and what is not? Lethem continues to display the idea that art is a major part of our society and will continue to be manipulated and transformed into new pieces that will bring us further. It’s interesting to note these ideas when thinking about the Molotov Man and how one picture was transformed into a rioter painting that eventually led to a bigger movement. It does a good job of demonstrating the power of art and also highlights a possible issue of loss of true meaning through transformations. 

Link to Comic

Blog Poster: Shirley Liu

Description:

Originally our plan was to make comic of a girl seeing her parents fighting and then she starts to daydream of going on a trip. In reality, her parents were not fighting and she was actually on a trip. It was difficult to distinguish what was the daydream and what was reality so we chose to change the plot. So we changed it to a doughball finding a magic door and through this door, the doughball goes on a trip to many different famous places. Then, after the last trip, the doughball ends up in her bed back home. 

Process:

For the process of the project, I was responsible for the drawing assets. I drew the backgrounds with an Apple Pencil using a drawing app on an iPad. Firstly, Selina formatted the layout and used jquery to figure out how to make a slideshow. It was effective in telling the story however I wanted to make it a little more interactive and a little less choppy. We originally wanted to make a scroll but we could not figure it out. However, after thinking about it some more and researching online, I added an event listener called wheel to the image and changed the display from none to block to move from one image to another. Doing so would allow the user to scroll and be more engaged in the website. Additionally, on the last image, the user would be able to click on the door to advance to the next page. For the ending, I wanted to leave it up to the user’s interpretation of whether or not doughball was dreaming or ended up back home through the door. I would have liked it to be a little smoother but that may have required more images with doughball. 

Closing Statements:

I am very happy with the outcome of our project. I believe it incorporates interactive measures that allow the reader to be engaged. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this interactive comic project.