Hello! Welcome back to another audio assignment. This assignment is called Quote With A New Feeling, submitted by Christopher Vasquez. The description is as follows: “Most people have a favorite quote or saying that they know, use that and record yourself speaking it using programs like (audacity, garage band, etc..). After that mash up your audio recording with a sounds, song, or instrumental in the background too better explain the feeling that this quote or saying has on you.”
I chose the following quote from an interview with Bruce Lee. This one in particular resonates with my experience as a Eurasian martial artist who wants to appear on screen. In American media, we make a big deal about racial identity when in the end, we’re all just human –
Interviewer: “You ever think of yourself as Chinese or do you think of yourself as North American?”
Lee: “You know what, I want to think of myself as a human being. Because, I mean, I don’t want to sound like you know, ‘as Confucius say.’ But under the sky, under the heavens man, there is but one family. It just so happens, man, that people are different.”
I then combined it to some music from one of my favorite TV shows, Avatar: the Last Airbender. To see these Asian influences growing up and to see something so different than standard cartoons was amazing. This show teaches major life lessons for all ages. I chose this soundtrack for this quote not only because it blends the ‘East’ and the ‘West,’ but it is called the “Avatar’s Love.” As people, we need to love each other and not mind our differences. In the show, four nations, each representing an element, are at war. The orchestration shifts from something tender into something strong: the unification of humanity.
I also incorporated a heartbeat sound effect to represent this unity. We all have a heartbeat; we are all human. Editing was minimal, for I only changed the volume of each clip, split the quote into two parts so I could separate the last statement, and increased the reverb of the interview. Please listen:
Good lord I love Bruce Lee! I have so many Bruce Lee books. This is how my friends decorated my framed posters for my birthday:
I love quotes, so when I saw the Quote with a New Feeling Assignment (2.5 stars), I knew it was one that I would want to do. I then started thinking about it and realized that it could be a good one to use Ella Maguire for. I think quotes are really helpful and can represent where people are in their lives now.
To find the right quote, I went to my trusty source of quotes, Pinterest, to find a quote about change. I decided on this one: “If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.” Ella is at a huge crossroad in her life. She just turned 18, she is about to go to college, she just found out she is a witch, and on top of all of that, she is questioning her sexuality. A lot in Ella’s life has changed recently and will continue to change for a little while. As one of my friends said abroad, “High schoolers are silly in thinking that high school graduation is the last goodbye for a while. The change isn’t going to college, but rather college is four years of unending changes and goodbyes.” I really relate to that, and I think Ella probably will to.
She is coming to the end of high school, but she has so many more changes ahead of her. She has figuring out what it means to be a witch, and what her sexuality is, which can be two conflicting issues, coming up. If she is gay, she probably won’t be able to continue the family line of witches, which adds to her sexuality struggles of coming to terms with whatever it is. If I could tell Ella one thing, it would be this quote. She is going through a lot of changes, but she should keep pushing through and not be afraid of them. Good things can come from change, even if it’s uncomfortable.
I added a song I found from YouTube’s free music section, called, Rain on the Parade. I wanted to represent how Ella is probably feeling through the music being played in the background of the quote. She is probably feeling stressed and somewhat sad about the changes and having to do all of these new things.
I first recorded the quote in iMovie and then I uploaded the song I downloaded from YouTube’s free music to the project. I wanted to have some of the loud piano notes before and after the quote, with slight rain in the backdrop of the quote. I cut the song down to about 15 seconds and played around with what part I wanted. I placed my quote in the middle, and iMovie automatically made the sound of the song softer during the quote. I really liked how the piano started before the quote finished. I feel like it is a reminder that good things come after change and that life keeps going. Sometimes I feel like people can be so scared of change that they forget that life continues on after it. Once I liked the sound and felt like it fit my message, I exported the project as a file and uploaded it to SoundCloud.
Hello everybody! This week I chose to do the “Quote With A New Feeling” assignment. In this assignment I was to find a quote and record myself saying it. After recording myself, I was to mash up my audio recording with sounds, songs or instrumental music to better explain the feeling that this quote has on me.
I chose a quote from “La Jetée”. Below is my result.
“She accepts as a natural phenomenon the ways of this visitor who comes and goes, who exists, talks, laughs with her, stops talking, listens to her, then disappears.”
Behind the Process
To begin the process, I decided to use a quote from “La Jetée” as I had watched it for class last week. Since watching this film, one quote has been stuck in my head. So I chose this quote and translated it into English. I recorded myself saying it in Audacity. Recording myself was once again the easy part of the assignment because I knew how I wanted to say it and what inflection to bring to it.
I decided that me saying the quote was a little boring. So I decided to intercut the main character of “La Jetée” saying it too. This gave the quote an interesting back and forth, almost like a dialogue. I think that this element of my assignment is something I did well. I was inspired by this weeks listening from Detective Stories in which they use this technique. This element adds layers and a sense of character to the audio.
For background music I went to 78 RPMs and Cylinder Collection. I dug around for awhile and stumbled upon this track called “By the Waters of Minnetonka” by The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. There is something about this song itself and its quality that feels ethereal. This correlates to how I feel when I hear the quote from “La Jetée”. I also had to learn how to use this website because I initially had no idea how to download the audio. After finding where to download, I had to learn which file type would work best with my audio project.
One difficult thing about this assignment was getting the main character saying the quote. I could not find a short YouTube video of him saying it. I really wanted a short clip not a 21 minute video to download because I am not about that life. To avoid downloading a large video file, I used Screencast-O-Matic to rip the audio. I am not really happy with the quality of the audio therefore this is the one part of this assignment I would improve.
I liked this assignment as it allowed me to mess around more with layering audio. I also liked playing with the effects to achieve the quality I wanted. I did find this assignment fun and would definitely do it again if I had a choice.
Well, that is it for now. I’ll catch you on the flipside.
This audio assignment might be a little…international. The challenge behind this assignment was to take a quote of inspiration and record yourself saying it. Afterwards, you needed to add background music that pairs with the power of the quote.
Voilà! I present a favorite French quote of mine – Sois belle à ta façon – or, ‘Be beautiful in your own way.’
This challenge was fairly straightforward because I’m getting used to Audacity. I did have some troubles at first, however, because I attempted to use a Voice Memo from my iPhone. That wouldn’t work, but I found it was actually easier to just record my voice on Audacity instead! Look at me problem solving
This week, I decided to create my own assignment to help push myself to do something creative and learn new skills using the “mashup” concept. This is my first time creating an assignment, but I think that it’s a really interesting option to be able to guide your own creative learning experience. Having this opportunity to force myself to try something I’ve been wanting to do for a while has been very beneficial.
As an avid watcher of Twitch streams, I find myself enveloped in the community and always wanting to engage. My favorite streamer, Kurumx, has the best community I’ve found in over 7 years on Twitch and a great deal of the engagement comes from the use of fun and silly emotes. These emotes can be anything from GIFs of John Cena eating ice cream to still images of an extremely happy frog throwing it’s arms up in the air and everything between. Because of this, chatters are always looking for new ways to use emotes, but more specifically, new emotes to add to the channel’s arsenal.
With this heavy emphasis on emotes in Kurum’s chat, I decided to become the “tiny hat” guy. For some backstory, there is an emote called “peepoBlushHat,” seen above as the image for the assignment in the assignment bank, that I’ve always loved. Feeling inspired, one day I jokingly asked if Kurum would wear nothing but a tiny hat on stream for us, pairing the message with this emote, and it quickly became “my thing” in chat. Before long, I was showing up to chat each night sending “peepoBlushHat” as my only “hello” message in chat and I would get a tsunami of chatters sending nothing but the emote in chat, as well, responding to my greeting. I knew that this was the start of something special, and months and months later I still am the “peepoBlushHat” guy, but not for much longer.
When watching Twitch streams, you gain channel points from being there, being active in chat, and participating in a gambling feature. Streamers can set channel point rewards to be redeemed by viewers, giving a reason to want to gain more and putting pressure behind gambling points. One of the point rewards in Kurum’s channel is “active any emote you want,” which gave me an idea. Because the streamer ultimately came detached from the idea of the hat, drifting away from the idea of him wearing a hat and more towards me being the hat guy, I wanted to redirect things back on track a bit. To do this, I figured I could put the hat and blush from the frog onto Kurum instead and submit it as an emote, then claim the reward in the channel to enable it for everyone to use. As previously mentioned, it was perfect timing because of the nature of the assignments required for this week, so I decided to make an assignment out of it.
I started by taking the original image, peepoBlushHat, and loading it into GIMP to crop out the hat as best as possible. Then, I contemplated how I would get an image of Kurum smiling in a similar, very adorable manner. Unfortunately, at the time of creating, Kurum wasn’t in a great mood and was a bit mopey, so I was worried I couldn’t take my own screenshot and instead would have to find a generic picture of him online to use. Regardless, I decided to still take a shot and see if I could miraculously catch him mid-smile. Using a PC app called Gyazo, I highlighted a box around Kurum’s face cam and waiting to grab the screenshot. With some incredible stroke of luck, only seconds later someone in chat said the funniest thing all night and I was able to grab a picture of Kurum smiling very genuinely. This was perfect because I had a unique image that isn’t being used elsewhere and was able to get it quite easily.
Once I had this last element, it was just a matter of positioning and resizing the hat, editing out some of Kurum’s hair because it’s so tall, and applying a light pink brush to his cheeks to replicate the blush. This was the most difficult part, though, as I’m decently new to GIMP and was having trouble with layers, selection, and resizing. Thankfully, though, after a bit of time, a few tutorials and Google searches, and a decent bit of effort, I was able to complete the emote.
Though ultimately it wouldn’t be a tiny hat, which would be sticking true to the origins, there was a couple problems with that. For one, the only hat emote I could originally find to represent this tiny hat I wanted Kurum to wear was peepoBlushHat, which ironically features an average size hat. Thankfully, I was able to manipulate this concept enough to explain it like, “when it’s a tiny emote in chat, the hat is also tiny.” Secondly, shrinking the hat down to an actually tiny size would in turn make the hat so small that it may not be viewable on some monitors, or at least would be very difficult to make out. Regardless, I transferred the elements over from peepoBlushHat very well, kurumBlushHat was born, and chat LOVED it.
As soon as the emote was added, the chat started flooding with it, and as you can see, people instantly knew who made it and what it was made in relation to. Deathrider3’s comment, “finally tiny hat,” and lilkahuna directly addressing me in chat show that the tiny hat phenomenon has existed for a while. Now, I’ve finally been able to leave my mark on Twitch in a small way, but more specifically the community that I actively engage in most nights. This experience was incredible and I feel that much closer to fellow chatters. Hilariously, Kurum trash talked the emote calling it a “monstrosity” and an “abomination,” all the while laughing and enjoying that hundreds of viewers in chat were spamming it. After making those comments, people started saying things such as, “Bro, it’s literally a picture of you with a hat on blushing, so you’re an abomination?” Even though the streamer was joking, chat was very wholesome and supportive saying, “But he worked so hard on it >:(” and things of that nature.
The entire journey that this assignment has taken me on has been incredible and I really hope that current and future students have a similar connection with a Twitch community and are able to make something fun, at the very least. Making the emote was a great deal of fun, especially when things were really coming together, but the experience that followed was priceless. Because of this story and journey, I felt it appropriate in the assignment description to allow the assignment to be counted as 4 stars if someone else can have this experience.
One final thing I wanted to share to close out the blog post is another bit of feedback I received on the emote. When enabling it in Kurum’s channel, it was used a lot immediately, and some chatters really loved it and enabled it on their own streams as well. Other than myself and Kurum, 8 other streamers enabled the emote in for themselves and I’ve been able to use it in their channels as well. This means that it has spread past my initial hopes for it and is making an even bigger mark than I had originally anticipated.
“Create a 30-45 second radio commercial for a product from the 80’s. Add in some background music and/or sound effects to make it sound like a real radio commercial.”
I know creative people usually hate the question ‘where does your inspiration come from?’ and usually have a slew of witty answers to snap back. But in this case, I can kind of explain where the inspiration for this came from.
Well, first It might come as no surprise to you that I am indeed stressed. I am very busy at the moment and so are a lot of the people around me. At least four people I have talked to today mentioned stress eating, and I will admit that the amount of desserts I had tonight is not a usual number for me. I am not on my fourth cookie right now, no not at all. So a stress-eating product, from there it was just a short jump to gum and an even shorter jump to the product being very ironic and clearly an extremely bad idea.
I don’t know if you have seen unedited footage of a bear, but that is kind of the way I wanted this to go. I wanted this commercial to be not quite right. Between that and too many late nights stuck on infomercial channels, I was good to go.
I wrote the script and recorded it,
then it was time for the music.
Like the assignment description says, go 80’s. With such a specific and wonderful direction, I went for it. I looked for 80’smusic on free sound and found my clip. It was only thirteen seconds. That fact becomes important later.
I wanted the commercial to get progressively weirder and more uncomfortable as it went on, and what better way to do that than through music? (Turns out there is a better way, and I did that too, but for now, let’s talk music) Instead of looping the music cleanly, which I could have done, I made it glitchy and rough. It might not be super noticeable, but the music is definitely not quite right and that’s the feeling I wanted to convey.
Then for my favorite/least favorite part: the chewing. I was thinking about what kind of sound effect I could add in— and this was just too perfect to ignore. I started the sound off slowly and made it get louder and louder until it is impossible to ignore and quite difficult to listen to. I actually haven’t listened to the finished product more than I had to because the chewing sounds are very very gross.
Oh, and if you are new here to a bird’s string of thought, I edit audio on iMove, and it looks like the photo above.
Ok, this may seem random and like a waste, but I promise it’s not. Our radio show has more characters than we have actors, so I wanted to try my hand at editing voices so they sound like two different people before offering this up as something we could do. I think it worked out pretty well, although there is a little distortion and I would have to keep playing with it to get it perfect.
The quote is from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s the point where pretty much all hope is lost and Gandalf, the wizard mentor character who has already died once, and Pippin, the comic relief who’s not much more than a child, are coming to terms with the fact that they were not going to get out of the coming battle alive. It’s a fairly sweet moment between two characters who for the rest of the story have not gotten along.
If you know the lore (and I mean REALLY know the lore, this stuff isn’t easy to find) you’ll know that the afterlife Gandalf is describing is the afterlife that he saw when he died and where he expects to return when he dies again. This is because he is a Maia, a demigod of that world. He is immortal, he can only go between what I’m calling the astral plane and the real world. Pippin is a hobbit; he’s mortal. He won’t see the afterlife Gandalf is describing. (Tolkien was Catholic so Pippin and all the other mortal characters go to judgement.) Gandalf likely knew that, but couldn’t think of anything else to say to the hobbit they both thought was about to die. I tried to capture that bittersweetness in the music, a stock piece I found a long time ago called “Soft Horror Piano Drone.” I didn’t think it was particularly horrific, I thought it was more sad and maybe threatening or foreboding than scary.
I put the music in Audacity, where I already had my voices. I recorded Pippin’s track first, and then Gandalf’s. For Pippin’s voice, I pitched it up a bit and sped it up some, as well as increasing the bass a little (to make it sound more masculine) and increasing the treble a lot (to make it sound smaller). I also did an accent to differentiate him better. It’s terrible but I’m calling it a Shire accent. For Gandalf’s, I pitched it down significantly, sped it up a little so it sounded more natural and increased the bass to make it more masculine. I also added a slight echo to make him sound a little more ethereal. Then I played with the pauses so it sounded right with the music. That put me at about 20 seconds, so I cut the music down (it’s a two-and-something minute piece) and had it fade out. I ended up with a pretty neat effect, I think. They definitely don’t sound like the same person recording it back to back. If I were to use this again, I don’t think I would make the differentiation quite as dramatic, less is more I think. At least in this case.
I was tasked with identifying a particular emotion and selecting three songs that I believe capture this feeling for this assignment.
The first song captured me from the first time I heard it. I love all types of music but have a special place for the sixties and seventies music. David Gilmour helped shape Pink Floyd into the eclectic sound that created a revolution in music. His solo album “There’s No Way Out Of Here”, which was recorded between Dark Side of the Mood and The Wall, features this song of the same name.
The next song “Where Is My Mind”, was featured in the movie Fight Club and, at first, may not come across as sad to some people because of its repetitious chorus. The writer describes how life can lose meaning and goes on without waiting for one to take action. While sad in that context, I believe this song can help draw inspiration towards making meaning out of the small things that we do every day.
The last song on my list is a newer one that is somewhat of a guilty pleasure, but I think people will undeniably agree that Adele can sing! “Easy On Me” is a song about divorce and the struggle of raising a child in a broken home. I enjoy the piano in this song, and it has a smooth gospel feeling mixed with a bit of blues.
Sometimes it helps to listen to sad songs, as it can be an excellent outlet for emotion. It is also one that helps me find my expression and creativity. The title of this blog is the start of a Bob Ross quote that perfectly expresses the emotion of sadness.
“Gotta have opposites, light and dark and dark and light, in painting. It’s like in life. Gotta have a little sadness once in awhile so you know when the good times come. I’m waiting on the good times now.”
I saw this assignment and immediately jumped on it. When I make playlists on Spotify I always make them to match a feeling or vibe I feel. I have playlists perfect for that sunny day on the beach that is just full of happy upbeat songs. I have a playlist to capture the feelings you have that are symbolic of cold gray winter days. I just was like this is perfect! This is how my brain works when I hear songs. I listen to the beat and the lyrics and always pair it with an emotion or feeling. I pick my songs based on my moods. For this assignment I knew what I wanted to tweet.
I picked 3 songs that make me feel just at peace. I am happy and relaxed when I hear these songs. For me these songs are songs I picture listening to on the car ride back from the beach. These are songs I listen to after spending the day in the sun, laying on the warm sand and hearing the waves crash. These are songs that play when you drive home from your favorite type of day with the windows down feeling the warm summer evening air in your hair. Just happy. Simple and pure.
1. People Watching – Jack Johnson 2. Get to Me – Train 3. Forever Young – Rod Stewart
For me these songs are just great. They just make me smile and perfect for driving back from a perfect day on the beach
Born in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Ohio, Beau Hannity’s childhood was quite uneventful. He was below average in almost everything he did, often feeling a cut below the rest of the kids his age in school. His dad, an avid storm chaser who was known for taking risks and going further than anyone else was comfortable, believed in his son more than anyone. He saw the potential in that kid, but knew he didn’t see it in himself.
“I hear there’s this great big hurricane headed toward the east coast. I’m thinking about driving out to Florida to get eyes on it…” said Craig Hannity, Beau’s ambitious and thrill-seeking father. The Joy of Painting played faintly in the background, Bob Ross ever joyously saying “…just beat the devil out of it!” “Well what am I, chopped liver?” Beau asked under his breath, not wanting to speak up as previously he hadn’t shown any interesting in tagging along with his father. “Ohohoh, so you wanna go, huh?” said Craig, leaning over to pat his son on the back. “Like father like son, eh?” “I just want to check it out…see what all the hype is about, you know? Nothing crazy…not like I’ll be useful or anything…” said Beau, lightly again as to still participate while trying to fade into the background. His dad rolled his eyes and let out a troubled sigh. “Well, better get to packing.”
The drive was long and painful with seemingly endless traffic through some states. At one point, Craig desperately needed to rest but didn’t want to have to find any lodging, so he asked Beau if he’d take over for a bit. “I can’t. I’m not good enough, I’ll probably just end up crashing…” mumbled Beau. Abruptly, Craig pulled off onto the side of the road and effortlessly put the car in park. “Son… you need to start believing in yourself. You tell yourself all of these lies about your capabilities, but boy… you can do so much more than you think. Strength is built upon inner character… you just need to look at your inner being for guidance!” cried Craig, desperately hoping for some switch to flip in Beau’s mind. “I’ve always been handed everything and can’t do anything for myself…and you constantly push me to change for the better but what if I can’t change?!” shouted Beau. “This life is yours. Some of it was given to you; the rest, you made yourself. You should be proud of yourself and your potential, but you need to keep pushing yourself. Embrace change; don’t fight it.” said Craig, optimistically and with a shimmer in his eye, placing his hand on Beau’s shoulder. Beau dropped his head down for a second before slowly nodding in agreement with his dad. Before long, Beau was in the driver’s seat taking on the next stretch of the journey.
It was a cold day in July when they arrived, with winds already whipping and trouble on the horizon. They made it just in time. A great, towering hurricane danced across the edge of their view as the Hannitys flew down the highway at 110mph. Beau held on tight to the steering wheel, feeling like he was aboard a rocket to the moon, adrenaline pumping through him making him feel as alive as ever. As the distance between the car and the storm closed, Craig started to feel like something was off. He hadn’t ever seen a storm like this before. It was almost as if the hurricane was morphing in shape and size, moving up and down, left and right sporadically. All of a sudden, like a cigarette in a gas tank, the hurricane lit up in flames. Something that resembled an incredible phoenix occupied the sky directly ahead of Beau and Craig. “What on earth?!” shouted Craig, bewildered by what was directly in front of him. Before Beau could even react enough to make a noise, the cloud of flames in the sky transformed into a mass of metal in the sky, clanging together like forks in the garbage disposal. Huge pieces of shrapnel began falling around the car as Beau hopelessly bobbed and weaved the car across the road, trying to find an opportunity to whip the vehicle around. Right when he finally found an opening, as if it was aware of the situation, the storm shifted states again to a frigid blizzard, laying out sheets of ice across the ground. The car began to spin out on the now slippery asphalt, sliding uncontrollably towards the storm that was a mere 25 feet away. A gust from the wintery storm proceeded to sweep the car into it’s core, lifting it off the ground. The view from every window was a blinding white, and the force of the storm began crumpling the vehicle like a soda can. The driver’s side door, the first to receive any damage, is ripped off and nearly instantly Beau is found dangling out of the open door, tangled up in seatbelt, holding on for dear life. “Son!” Craig screamed from the interior, being crushed more and more by the second. “I don’t think I’m going to ma-” but before Craig could complete his final cry, the two were ripped apart, with Beau tearing free from the seatbelt and the car crumpling completely and being flung out of sight in the blink of an eye. At this moment, Beau thought it was all over and he could feel himself pulling away from life. His eyes closed and he attempted to find peace in his final moment, freezing in the heart of an otherworldly storm. Suddenly, he felt as though he was suspended in zero-gravity with a rush of relieving warmth passing through him. He opened his eyes to find himself in a protective barrier of electricity, with currents connecting from the sphere into his arms, legs, and eyes. He could feel his eyes flicker with power. “Embrace change; don’t fight it…” echoed his father’s voice in his head. He closed his eyes once more and took a long blink before opening them once more to witness the state of the storm changing from a dust devil to a lava plume to a noxious gas cloud, with each new variation flowing directly out of him, spreading to the rest of the storm, changing it as it spread. Off to the side, Beau noticed the crumbled remains of the car, with his father crushed inside. “Whatever you are…I’m gonna beat the devil out of you!” Beau yelled with the force of a thousand bulls, followed by a bright flash of light…
