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The Melting Pot Melting Family

From the “What is Culture?” assignment: Create image that you think this is culture for you. It is acceptable to use two more pictures if you want. (2 stars)

I found two pictures from 2008 when my Virginia cousins came to visit with my cousin’s then-girlfriend (now, since 2011, wife).  It is a picture of my grandfather and cousin and his then-girlfriend at the Pali Lookout.  The trees that overlap their heads are the palm tree and a more Christmas Tree-like one.  I think this is an accurate representation of my cousin and his wife.  His Asian family from Hawai’i and her White background from all over Virgina depicted in trees and where their roots (HA) are.  Hawai’i is already so much of a melting pot that interracial marriages are really not a big deal. Their distance also symbolized their geographic distance.  I think the main thing I was trying to get at here is that culture can be mashed together.

I used Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 6 to create this image cranking down the opacity of the overlaid trees that I used a magic wand tool of death for.  The colors are a little askew and so are the proportions for the trees, but the trees are really dramatically different heights as well as the couple.  Also, I used CS6 to adjust the lighting and contrast to give a more realistic view of the Pali.

Moulin Rouge and Forcing You to Cry.

Mine:

IfMoviePosterTold

The Original:

 

For the record, I love Moulin Rouge. Seriously. The flashy dances, the taboo life of a prostitute, and the music mash ups. Except the sad ending. I won’t ruin it for you, but you’ll cry if you have a heart. Anywho, I correctly changed the tag line from “No Laws. No Limits. One Rule. Never Fall In Love.” to “No Laws. No Limits. One Rule. Cry.” by using the paintbrush tool in Gimp and painting over the original in black to blend in and then using the text tool to “fix it”. I found the original poster here, and naturally, the assignment here.

 

My Album Cover?

This Visual Assignment was incredibly fun and random. I was not going to complete this because I already had completed enough assignments to get credit for the week but I just loved what happened.

Here are the directions for the assignment:

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/an-album-cover/

Basically I had to do a mash-up of all these random things to create an album cover. My name turned out to be Nils Rydström, who was actually a Swedish fencer who competed in the Olympics way back. I love the name because it looks pretty rock and roll with the umlaut above the ‘o’.

Here is some information on how heavy-metal groups use umlauts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

 
Next there was a random quote by JFK that ended with “Powers Along Lines of Excellence.” Again, pretty sweet.

Next I had to get the photo for the cover that just happened to have power lines in it. I thought it fit perfectly with “Powers Along Lines.”

This seemed too good to be true. Here is the final product:

 

albumfinal1

Nice day ruined by the rain

Testing testing
(sorry, in the process of trying to make my blog pretty I thought I had deleted the whole thing, good thing Prof. Levine reminded me that I probably just messed up the formatting) It’s true what they say, what you post on the internet, stays there forever!

Okay, so somehow between me freaking out, my blog going cray, and me reposting half of my post I don’t see the one about my sounds!

Don’t cry readers, I’ve come to fix it.

So my sound is basically about people enjoying their day at the beach and getting rained on.  We all hate those days at the beach! I hope you enjoy my sound!

I used Audicity to mash up all of my sounds, FreeSound to download the sounds, and SoundCloud to upload it so everyone can hear it.  It was a lot of hard work and a lot of youtube tutorial videos to get this thing going, so I hope you guys enjoy it!

P.S. I know I’m 12 seconds short :(

Radio Bumper

So this bumper was pretty easy to create. I mashed up myself saying “ds106 radio”, “Clubbed to Death” by Rob Dougan, and some crazy radio static, just not exactly in that order. The beauty of audacity is that you can layer these things and play with your own recordings. I played with some effects on [...]

Bumper Time

I managed to finish my first ds106 bumper woo woo. I didn’t really understand what a bumper was so Iooked it up here. My thought behind my bumper was to try and create something that was smooth but also kept the listener’s interest with the final whistle.  I played with a couple different sounds and ended up with this:

After making my sound story the bumper was a lot less intimidating. I found all my clips on freesound.org and mashed them together using audacity.I enjoyed playing with the different sounds and trying to think of a series of sounds that would be audibly interesting but also able to be a filler/transition for a radio show. 

A Bumper You Can Bump To

So, a few hours ago, I didn’t know how OR what I wanted to do for my DS106 Bumper. And since I didn’t know what a bumper was at first, you may not know either. A bumper is the short audio clip that plays on radio stations to remind you what station you’re listening to, who is on the air, or even what kind of music is played. To put it simply, if you own a radio, you’ve heard one before.

I was a little scared for this assignment; 1. Because I didn’t know how long it would take and I’m running short on time 2. I didn’t know how saying DS106 radio with my own voice would turn out.

Turns out that with the help of Freesound and Audacity, I can make miracles happen with audio! I was able to nab some free sound effects off of Freesound, record my own voice in Audacity, and mash it all together and edit this little piece:

As with the FIRE FX post, I wish I had some more time to edit and make something really smooth. But I’m happy with what I created and am proud to start getting into audio editing!

Sound Story – A day in a life

So my sound story is supposed to convey the changing from evening to night, from the activity of the day to the quiet, sometimes tranquility of the night. I was inspired by what I hear on beautiful days with my windows open and the world going on outside. I’m keeping in mind what Ira Glass said about everyone’s work sucks at some point and I think I’m at that point with audio. I have some issues with transitioning sounds but overall I’m happy with my first encounter with audio. I didn’t quite kill it as Glass said to but I think I gave it a few bruises.

I found all 7 of my sound clips on freesound.org and mashed them together using audacity. I used separate sounds for the passing car, children playing, dogs barking, birds chirping, crickets, wind, and owl hooting. It was my first time using both and while at first audacity threw me I was able to figure it out and enjoyed using it. I accidentally deleted my audio workings a couple times but in the end I figured out not to do that and it all worked out well, I think. 

PLEASE ENJOY YOUR MUSICALLY AUGMENTED AUDITORY EXPERIENCE

And THAT, ladies, gentlemen and test subjects, is how you bumper some gosh-darn radio, Aperture Labs style.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Portal franchise, I have a few words for you. First: WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?? No, seriously, you need to reevaluate your existence, and then play Portal. Second: if for some reason you disregard my first point, the bumper I created is mimicking the speech of a homicidal AI from the video game I mentioned before, an utter gem of a program named GLaDOS. She’s kind of incredible but also demented, and her voice has become one of many iconic elements from the smash-hit game.

I was just about ready to murder the “Create a ds106 radio bumper assignment” by the time I finished with it, so I guess I met Prof. Burtis’ criteria for a good radio assignment. The biggest issue I ran into for creating my radio bumper was that the tutorial I’d relied on to create this voice effect last year is no longer quite effective, probably due to some updates to Melodyne, one of the programs necessary for creating this effect. I tweaked the tutorial a bit, most notably in that I recorded my own vocals with my handheld digital recorder and then converted those files to .WAV format using Online-Converter.com. After that, I used Audacity for basic editing and the 30-day free trial of a super detail-oriented audio editor called Melodyne, which I mentioned earlier, to flatten and modulate the pitch of my voice until it sounded like GLaDOS.

I’m still not 100% happy with how it turned out–like I said, last time I tried this tutorial the result was a lot better, maybe because of the way I spoke the original audio and not the tutorial itself?–and I’m unsure about how effective it’ll be as a radio bumper, but I have to let this thing rest and move on to my other assignments for the week. I hope at the very least somebody gets a kick out of this when it plays!

5 Sound Story: Heart Attack

Okay, this assignment started off to be a pain in my ass (excuse my language) but I managed to fight through it and learn to love Audacity.  I’ve never used it before but had a BLAST making this clip.  I started out with about fifteen different types of clips from Freesound, but narrowed my selection down and found the right ones to use for my clip.  I managed to make it 1:30 and I think it sounds really really cool!  Definitely a lot of tension but check it out!

When I first opened up Audacity, I had no idea what I was doing.  I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to look up directions, so I played around with it until I was comfortable enough making my own clip.  Then the fun began.  I used Thunder on a loop, Heartbeat on a loop, a door opening, a creaking floor, and a crash for my five sound clips.  I think that I used them all appropriately and actually got wrapped up in the assignment I lost track of time.

My main goal was to create something that made you sit on the edge of your seat.  Being my first attempt at this, I believe that I most definitely succeeded.  I’m going to Tweet this out for sure and try to get people to comment on this because I’m proud of what I made.  It’s amazing what mashing a couple of audio clips can get you.  Definitely something fun and exciting to play around with.  I’ll be doing this a lot more with other clips in the near future.

If I had to choose, I would say that this was one of the best assignments that I’ve done so far this semester in this class.  It was a lot of fun to be able to mix and match different clips and create something of my own based on what I thought sounded the best in each spot.  I hope that you all enjoy the clip and comment for me please!

I was unaware that it was only supposed to be 60 seconds and instead, I made it 90 seconds.  I hope that Professor Burtis lets this one slide!  Just think of how much less intense it would be without those extra 30 seconds :-)