Category: Leon Eckert

The danger of a single story is a relevant topic today and the future. The irony is that while today we have the internet and an abundance of information in our finger tips, the fact that people still stick to the single story is astonishing. This issue stems from information that is presented to us on the internet. Certain narratives can be constructed in such a way that influences the way we perceive a certain subject. In today’s age, the net and other news outlets often construct the same single story for every subject. For the viewer, this single narrative is easy to accept it because it has been heard before. Many of these news outlets know this and spoon feed the viewers what they want to hear. Being able to look at a subject in a different light is difficult. However, as society progress into the 21^st century, we must understand the narratives presented to us. We must understand that we can’t always accept the information given to us. We have to process it, learn of more stories of the same subject, and always inquire about the truthfulness of such information.

            Adichie presents an interesting case of why she wanted to become a writer. Partly, she wanted to create stories for her home country rather than have single narrative that Africans are all starving. This is her way of fighting the single story. In her TED talk, she not only lectures her audience of the danger of the single story but also provokes people to tell their own stories as a way prevent the single-story problem. Everyone should tell their own story, to provide different perspectives in order to create multi-story narrative.  

Initially, our idea was to create a collage of sounds of Shanghai. However, as we began to record sounds for that idea, we impulsively recorded simple sounds that did not relate to our topic at all. It was that we had this idea that we could take these simple sounds and piece them together to create a composition. Then, we had the idea of creating a sound board. This idea is challenging at first because we didn’t know how to piece the sounds we collected. We ended up using javascript to create a repetitive beat to piece together the sounds. Our website will include a board where a variable beat will be played every second. The user will be able to put certain beats on certain tiles in order to create a unique composition.

            The sounds that we collected all originated from hitting simple objects from around the AB. For example, we used a simple clap and snap in our composition. Additionally, we took the sound of opening the trash can in the 8^th AB as a simple sound. Once we collected those sounds, we went on Audacity and manipulated it by taking certain sections of those sounds. The outcome is a beat that can be used on the sound bard. Nan manipulated most of the sounds while I helped record the sounds

            The coding was the most challenging portion of our project. We had to code a system where the sound will played in a rhythmic pattern. The design we proposed is a beat will be played every second. The user can change it so that up 10 beats can be played every second. Within those beats, the user can select those simple sounds to implement in their composition. The outcome of such sounds can very rhythmic and catchy.

I have a similar experience with Chimamanda’s being treated with stereotypes. I am from Shandong province where every man should be stereotypically tall and strong with masculinity, but the fact is that I don’t. I was often joked at because of my height, but I would rather accept these jokes as the first topic for me to chat with others from China that have stereotype on Shandong people. But what Chimamanda is talking about hints a much larger context of racism and regional discrimination. The literature creates an image of Africa to attract white men in the western world with an exotic perspective, and people would take it for granted that what the literature says about Africa is the true Africa, without considering the logic behind the capitalized cultural product.

More importantly, Chimamanda’s experience has many things to say to us who are the fresh hands in media production. The media provides the audience with a powerful tool to perceive information, thus what content to produce is an important thing to consider. As media producers, on the one hand, we need to record the objects that we want to produce with less bias and try to think in the objects’ shoes in order to take a proper angle to tell stories. On the other hand, media producers should also consider the powerfulness of the medium, and have less bias in the production process in what to say and what to cut. As the audience of media production, it is also a question for us to think about whether the story in the things we see is biased or not.

Project: A Sound Board with Elements Collected around the Campus

Partner: Justin

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~js9686/audio-project 

Description:

In this project, I am in charge of the major portion of audio collecting and editing and a small portion of participation in the coding (on the instruction page). Justin is in charge of the main portion of coding, especially in the soundboard part. (Justin is so amazing!!)

I initially wanted to create two melody lines that represent the theme of Shanghai to accord with the beats that the soundboard creates out of the user’s choice, but failed. Reason: I cannot extract pure vocal in high resolution (with no original beats) from the existing songs.  Then after this failed attempt, our idea gets converged that we could do a soundboard using the sound sources that are around us.

We collected sound around us collectively. Here are the 8 sources of sounds that we used:

Using these patterns from daily life, we created a series of percussion from treble to bass. We made them into a soundboard, with the message to convey that every sound around us can be musical.

Justin and I collected all the sound assets together, and I edited them to make them sound “instrumental.”

I used Adobe Audition to edit the sounds. Besides the basic effects like cropping, shrinking, noise canceling, I also adjusted the reverberation, humidity, and tone of the sounds that we collected. I arranged the paper snipping sound as the highest treble and the cardboard knocking sound as the lowest bass. To make sure the sound elements are harmonious when playing together in a random organization, I arranged all the edited elements into a multi-track file, and set a muted metronome at the tempo of 150 to hear the result. When meeting somewhere disharmonious, I would go back to the original sound wave and make some adjustments.

Justin was in charge of the coding of the soundboard, and he is super amazing.

Our first module looks like this:

User Testing Feedback:

Our code and assets were clearly illustrated on the webpage, but:

1. We did not make it explicit that all the sounds are collected around us;
2. People’ll click everywhere;
3. Our initial design of tempo adjustment (insert a number) is not intuitive;
4. The design is ugly.

Then we responded to these feedbacks on our website:

1. added an instruction page and a button to illustrate our ideas and to lead the user;
   1. On the instruction page, we added subtitles and illustrations on sounds.
   2. We colored the illustrations in their borders according to the colors on the elements on the soundboard, and let the user be aware which sound from the soundboard belongs to the which object via color.
2. expanded the soundboard to make it look good;
3. re-designed the color pattern and the fonts on the webpage.

Problems I encountered during resolving the previous flaws:

Coding part: I coded the instructions – click the images to hear what they sound like. I initially want to do the mouse hover thing to trigger the sound play. I referred to “onmouseover” and “onmouseoff,” but they are not able to use in Chrome to autoplay media according to policy restraint.  Solution: I used “onclick” instead to trigger the sound play.

Audio part: Successfully using the workflow I described above, I didn’t encounter some problem worth documenting.