Author: Ziying Wang

Link:

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tlb394/audio/index.html

Sketching Stage:

The original idea for this project was the three of us each make a track that represents a genre and combines them with a radio which the user can switch channels on. But this idea wasn’t suitable for a group project, so we decided to create a scenario where two friends are chatting through the phone, one of them is not in Shanghai but would like to know how the dorms are like, the other friend tells her that she can see it for herself, and the webpage combines all the sounds of the essential elements in the dorms, when the user clicks on it, they can hear the sound.

Design:
The page is divided into two parts, one is the phone call and the other part the simulation of the dorm scene. For the phone part, I photoshopped a telephone gif, when the user clicks onto the telephone, the conversation between two friends will play. Taylah and I recorded the conversation, with me being the one away from the dorm and Taylah intruding the dorm scene. We intentionally add the editsound effect to create a distant feeling when it’s my sentence to make it sounds distant, Taylah teditsthe audio together in one piece. I coded to make the telephone gif automatically changes into a play button gif when the audio is done playing.

For the second part , I set the background as a gif of Van Gogh’s starry night. It represents a nostalgic feeling which is related to our theme. Then I photoshopped the elements, including the doors, the laundry machines, the fridge, the kitchen cabinets, the sofa, the floors and the cat. When the user clicks on the element, it will play the sound of that element, the five dorm doors represent different in-dorm scenarios.

I used toggle function in coding so that with clicking on the same element once more the sound effect would pause, click it again and it will continue playing. Almost all the elements have this toggle function except for the at in the middle, once it is clicked it’ll play the background music non-stop. I coded it on purpose to make sure there’s no sudden stop in background music. Also, I made the cursor change when it moves to the objects, so the user would realize that they are clickable. I made the cursor “grabbing hand” on almost every element (except for the cat again) to make it looks like it is touching the element, and the cursor on cthe at is a pointer.

Difficulties:

I came across some problems when doing thee css part, the elements wouldn’t line up as I want on the screen, then I knew the specific use of position function in css, learnt how “relative” and “absolute” work.

If I had more time, I would add more interactive features on the webpage, this webpage is currently just for enjoying the scenario by simply listen to the audio. But I’m not sure about further improvement, it’s not an excuse for not making more pages (ex. When the user clicks on the door, he sees the inside), instead, I want this experience based on sound, not the traditional way of perceiving information through vision. So I’d still want to figure out what improvements I can make to deepen our meanings.

Theft and Artistry introduces conflicts on cultural appropriation within music. It takes examples of popular tracks and discusses the cultural conflict its involved in. Personally, as a music lover, I am aware of how different music genres are originated from different cultures, but I never consider a piece of music has to carry a certain label. A genre may be addressed as originated from culture because people from that culture first discover, or simply because its people are mostly making music in that genre. Artistic works always need inspiration, when an artist is inspired, that inspiring thing is no longer the object of the artist’s creation, but the creation itself is representing the artist’s idea. Even when two creations look similar, the creators of either creation hold different beliefs when creating their works, and that shouldn’t be considered stealing or plagiarizing. Everything is, in a way, borrowed or stolen. No one is the owner of the language, or the owner of music, or color, every creation is a rearrangement of already-existing elements. When the critics in the text argue that Bieber’s song is absenting the full presence of Black and Brown woman and Hymn For The Weekend is a stereotype of Indian’s culture, I think the critics are holding their stereotypes of nowadays music. Regardless of the artists are actually doing this or not, we don’t and will never know their initial intentions and ideas, isn’t the behavior of labeling others’ works without knowing all aspects of them not very “sciency”?

Some people today are over interpreting, and maliciously interpreting artworks, trying to find every possible detail and maximize to vilify either the artist or the artwork. As an outsider of the artist’s mind, we should not suppose what the artist means and just express those guesses as of our personal interpretations.

This essay inspires me to think about the differences between “plagiarism” and “inspiration”. We support good artworks but when it comes to renovated pieces, we categorize them as plagiarized pieces and they should be disgusted. But judging the masterpieces in the history, Shakespeare for example, his Romeo and Juliet’s plot is similar to an ancient Babylonian story yet people still respect Shakespeare for his composing.

In this case, we should question ourselves, are divine authors being spared from the crime of plagiarism while the ordinary others are the main targets being watched? The renovation we make is inspired by original works but hardly not considered as “stealing” others’ ideas. The line between inspiration and plagiarism is murky and there isn’t a clear definition for either term. In my opinion, we should embrace all recreation works instead of judging them, even when the recreated version is similar to the original one, we should refer it as a better change, or a failed change of the original piece.