The Serger Story…

When I saw the two star Familiar Sounds assignment, I knew that I could use the sound I recorded from my serger. This is the sound story created by serging the cuffs of a pair of pants. As I serge I go quicker sometimes than I do others and often have to stop to adjust my fabric, which you can hear in the sound story.

In order to make the sound story, I leaned my iPod Touch against the serger as it ran, using my eyeglasses to hold it in place, which I forgot to take a picture of. I recorded the story in Voice Memos before emailing it to myself and shortening it in Audacity.

Some of the audio from this soundstory was used in our radio show as well.

serger story workspace-tiff

My workspace in Audacity

Storytelling Within the Web Assignment: How Cynics See UMW

Do you know anyone on campus who aaaallways has something negative to say about the school? In some cases what they say is true, but most of the time they just need something to complain about in front of their friends. It gets annoying. Wouldn’t it be simpler to transfer if you dont like the university? Apparently that concept is too complicated.

I created the How Cynics See UMW page by taking the original UMW homepage and editing the text to what is usually negatively said about the campus; “There’s no parties here!” “The food service here sucks!” ect. I do agree with a few of these, such as the small amount of diversity and the fact that our school’s slogan is cheesy, but I don’t complain about these aspects every waking moment! For the most part, I wouldn’t have selected any other college to attend.

Here’s the original UMW homepage

Picture 4

And here’s how cynics see it
Picture 1

I was unable to change the UMW logo and slogan just by typing over the text because the whole space was an image. This was the only place on the site where I had to use GIMP, since everything else was a basic editable text area.

Check out the main page to see the text a bit clearer. And for pete’s sake, don’t turn into one of these people!! People like these make the school more unbearable than what they actually claim.

My Dream College Experience

This may just be my favorite assignment yet! Anyone who knows me knows that I am not someone who picks favorites easily. Ever since I was little and someone asked me what my favorite part of vacation was or my favorite part of school, I simply responded with “everything”. I still do it to this day in fact. So when first brought upon the challenge to tell a story through a website I was a bit tentative. How am I going to do this? What website will I choose? What story will I tell?

I started thinking about different things that I could do. What do I use the Internet for? Well, recently it’s only been for Digital Storytelling and another class that I am in online. So, my top 8 visited websites mainly have to do with those, or Hulu since I watch way too much television. However, after looking at the top 8 visited websites I remembered something. Before this class took over my life (in a good way of course) I always had a number one visited site, umweagles.com. In fact, I visited that site so many times that it used to be my #1 AND my #6 most visited site. How that happened, I still have no idea. At first I started to dream really big, and I go onto ESPN’s website and put on my x-ray goggles and realized that I enjoyed having hair and didn’t want to pull it all out trying to even decode a thing. So I went to something that I thought would be simpler, NCAA. Once again I was wrong. I should have just stuck with my gut instinct and looked at UMW Eagles. Once I put on my goggles, I saw all the potential for manipulation.

At first I was going to make myself an All-American, then I was going to take the volleyball team onto some crazy trip. Then in a state of pure brilliance I decided to change things up a bit and make a new sport, dedicated to princesses. My mind started working at a million words per minute and I was just trying to gather everything together. A Princess sport. I first went right to equestrian, and I don’t mean riding horses, but I mean the competition style. There are different aspects that they get judged on, just like in gymnastics. So my idea is that the competitions would be more like a meet fashion rather than a game fashion. The criteria would be Magic Carpet racing, Archery, Sleeping Competition and finally a Math competition.

I loved being a college athlete. I came into this school lost and not knowing anyone, and it gave me a family right away. I wouldn’t trade my experience as an athlete for the world. I think it is a great way for students to really have a great college experience. So, why not open it up to Princesses? I would totally do all of these things if it was an option!

So I decided to “Pimp My Page” for lack of a better analogy. Using the x-ray goggles, I was able to change the pictures and the beginning of the stories as well as their titles. I even got to change the scores on the top!

Sadly, the main headlines do not rotate like they do on the main page, so it takes away a bit from the story that I wanted to tell. However I changed the stories anyway. So this is the order of the pages that I want you to view (to portray the switching from story to story). So just to make sure what I am saying is clear here is the deal. On the original website, the 5 most recent stories are rotated, starting with the most recent one.

So my here is my first page, second page, third pagefourth page, and fifth page.

Now that you have seen the result, it’s time for the down and dirty part. How the heck did I pull this off? Magic of course.

It actually was not too hard at all!! X-ray goggles really do help a lot. The stories were all very easy to fix, and the big pictures were easy to put in. In order to fix the big pictures, you had to type in the link for a picture that you found. This was easily done using google image search and hitting view original image and typing in that link to replace the one previously there.

Where I had the most trouble was the pictures on the bottom. The coding revealed that there was more than just the link because the picture had to be resized to be smaller.

Here was the basic format of the smaller picture:

thumbnail

Compare that to the basic format of the large picture:

Big_Picture_Basic

There was clearly a difference. It wasn’t until a bit of researching later that I realized something interesting. The part of the code that I could not change in the basic format (the gray part) was what was throwing me off. So I ventured into the advanced section to see what I could find. And I really liked what I got to.

Here is the advanced format for the small picture:

Thumbnail_Advanced

Here is the advanced format for the big picture:

Big_Picture_Advanced

 

The big picture’s advanced box has a nice clean simple way of putting dimensions in it! Which is why all the photos are the same size. However, the small picture has a weird complex and cryptic way that I did not want to figure out.

So simply all that I did for the small pictures code was change the dimensions to by 98 by 60 (which I figured out from the cryptic code).

As a final touch I decided to change some of the scores in the top. Just to keep things interesting.

I chose not to change all of the stories because that is not realistic on this website. Instead, I decided to show the announcement of the sport, the fundraising for the sport, and then one competition of the sport. I hope you enjoyed looking at it as much as I did!

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa

 

Quote of the Day

For my final audio assignment I did One Quote A Day which was worth one star.  The instructions for this assignment were “Quotes could be nice only by its own, but it might go further when it went beyond written words. Read your quote for a day out loud, and record it! Do not forget to give an appropriate feeling to it. Tone of voice could be a helpful hint for answerers to guess where your quote came from. Mimicking the original tone could be nice enough, but you also can add your own feelings to it as well. :)

I was looking for a one star assignment and was excited to find this one.  The quote I choose was one from my little sisters favorite movie ever We Bought a Zoo.

This assignment was quite easy to do.  All I had to do was record it on audacity and then import it into soundcloud. So here it is:

That’s all my stars for this week!

New Ringtone?

For my next audio assignment I did Make Your Own Ringtone which was worth two stars.   The instructions for this assignment were “trim, join end-to-end (cut/paste), and/or play side-by-side audio files in order to create your very own ringtone. Ringtones should be a maximum or 40 seconds to conserve phone memory (besides, most cell phones don’t ring longer than 30 seconds or so…the extra 10 seconds is just in case). Be creative, you might want to actually use it on your phone.”

I got excited for this one when I saw it.  I love the idea of mash-ups so I was excited to do a short one for my ringtone.  I played around for a little while with different songs and ended up coming across a video of Taylor Swift doing a mash up of her song Stay Stay Stay and the song Ho Hey by the Lumineers at her concert.  I totally loved it and decided to try to do these two songs for my ringtone.

Isn’t that great? Obviously mine wasn’t quite as creative and smooth as hers since I just combined the two recordings of the the songs but I am pretty pleased with how it turned out.

I ended up importing Stay Stay Stay first.  I wanted the songs to overlap a little so I ended up cutting the end of the chorus (which is purely instrumental) and repeating it three times at the end.  I then imported Ho Hey and lined that up right after the words of Stay Stay Stay ended.  I then faded out Stay Stay Stay after Ho Hey began.

Here is what the finished product looked like in audacity.

Screenshot

And here is what the final product sounded like.

 

Hope you like it! One more star to go!

Guess that Song!

For one of my audio assignments this week I did The Contest Nobody Could Win which was worth two stars.  For this assignment you had to “take six very short fragments (less than one second each) from six different songs and ensemble them into a single piece.”  The only rules that there were to this assignment were “1) do not repeat songs 2) do not use covers (unless the cover is much better than the original, sh*t happens) 3) John Cage’s 4’33” is not a song!!!”

I was right away drawn to this assignment because my family always like to play the game guess that song with the radio.  While I think I am pretty good at this game, I can honestly say I take a bit more than a second to guess the song most of the time.

This assignment was pretty easy to do.  I just imported songs out of my iTunes and straight into audacity. I then cut out everything but about the first second of every song.  I did this six times and then imported them together.  I decided to leave a little bit of time in between each song so that you could have a second or two to try to recognize the songs.

Here is a picture of what it looked like when I had it all edited together:

Screenshot

Any idea what any of these are?

Two Stars Down!

Guess the Songs — ??

When I’m driving, I can’t look down at my iPod to see what song is playing to determine if I want to keep listening to it (at least not safely). So, I’m a pro at figuring out songs before even a second of the song plays.

That’s why I took on this assignment for this week.

I listened to some other DS106ers’ assignments, and most people put the songs together, one after another. I really didn’t like all the songs being close together, because you can’t hear them start and finish. When I hear these radio contests, they don’t do it like that. So I went in another direction.

Radio shows also don’t make it impossible by picking the most random piece of the song to trick their listeners. They want people to know the song, so that’s what I did. I found popular songs and then cut out a part that most people would recognize.

I used Audacity again for this one since it was a simple cut and paste assignment.

I took songs from my iTunes library and imported them into Audacity one by one. Cut them down to under a second each and put about 2 seconds between each so they would be distinct pieces.

Lyric Tag — ???

For this week, I needed to complete a couple of audio assignments from the repository.

When I saw Music TagI knew I had to do it. Really, I like anything with mixing music.

This is the assignment description:

 Lyrics and songs are great ways to tell stories. Have you notice similar themes extend genres… lyrics overlapping. Your task is to create a story by using audio snippets from songs. The trick is you have to have the last word of your clip, be the same word that starts the next clip. Use at least 5 different songs, try to include different genres or decades.

I originally wanted to do something that was more than the typical story you hear in songs, but when I started doing that, the song clips were so short you couldn’t appreciate the songs at all. So I created a break-up story, basically.

The assignment gave a short tutorial on how to do this. It suggested using YouTube and recording them into Audacity. That’s not my thing.

Instead, I’m going to take you through what I did. I didn’t use YouTube videos, but I’m putting the links to the songs from YouTube so you can hear what songs I used.

The Short Version

This took the longest time. I started with a Taylor Swift song, “Breathe,” because one of the lines linked to another song I had been listening to recently, “Without You,” originally by David Guetta and Usher, but in this assignment, I used the Glee version.

But then I realized that I couldn’t start with the Taylor Swift song. First off, the part I wanted to use would have been so long, probably around 50 seconds, and this is supposed to be Music Tag!

Now this is when I started having to do some real work.

I went to lyrics sites of songs that I wanted to use, and I started matching up words so they didn’t sound strange. I put all the lyrics into a text document so I could lay out my story.

Then I pulled all the songs into a playlist in iTunes.

I used Audacity for this assignment because this was pretty basic editing.

I imported one song at a time, cut it down to just before the word or just in the middle in of the word I wanted to “play tag” with. Then I imported the next song until I had finished my story.

Here is the finished product

The list of songs in order with the lyrics used

Imagine Dragons, “It’s Time”

So this is what you meant
When you said that you were spent

And now…

Taylor Swift, “Breathe”

Now I don’t know what to be without you around
And we know it’s never simple, never easy
Never a clean break, no one here to save me
You’re the only thing I know like the back of my hand
And I can’t breathe, without

Glee Cast, “Without You”

Without you, without you
I am lost, I am vain

I will never be

Red, “Never Be The Same”

Be the same, I’m caught inside the memories, the promises,
Our yesterdays, when I belonged to you

Ellie Goulding, “Every Time You Go”

You said I’m arresting, you said I had heat
I really thought that we’d go further, the second time we meet
Cause I’m tired of trying to

Ra Ra Riot, “Can You Tell”

To wait, I think about you nightly
Oh, can you tell I’m losing sleep?
Oh, what am I supposed

The Script, “Breakeven”

Supposed to do when the best part of me was always you
And, what am I supposed to say when I’m all choked up and you’re okay

I’m falling

Katy Perry, “Wide Awake”

Falling from cloud nine, crashing from the high
I’m letting go tonight, yea, I’m

David Guetta feat. Sia, “Titanium”

I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose
Fire away, fire away
Ricochet, you take your aim, fire away, fire away
You shoot me down

La Roux, “Bulletproof”

Down, now I’ll never let you sweep me off my feet
This time baby, I’ll be bulletproof
This time baby, I’ll be bulletproof

So what’s the story?

I wanted to do the entire relationship, but I was already at 10 songs, so I thought I should stop…

So I went for the breakup. Breakups are messy.

I wanted to do the story of the ups and downs of a break up–for a girl especially.

Now, I’m a bit surprised that this worked out in a different way, too. The guy (male-lead songs) is whiny and the girl (female-lead songs) is getting over him. So I’m going to act like this was completely my idea and not a coincidence.

All the male singers are the guy’s perspective of the breakup: kind of upbeat in the beginning. The woman is confused and hurt, missing him. Then we go back to the guy, and he’s starting to struggle with being alone. But the girl is starting to get over him and isn’t feeling so down anymore. The guy is losing sleep over this and having trouble with how “okay” she is doing. She’s not perfect, though, still feeling like she’s “crashing from the high,” but she’s “letting go” finally. The last two songs are her basically saying she’s okay now and isn’t affected by him anymore.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. It was definitely the most fun to create this story and have it turn out so well. It flows, and that is what I wanted.

 

Multipersonality

Another assignment I completed for this week’s audio assignments was multipersonality. The task was to, “pretend that you are three to four persons having a regular conversation.” Being that my group chose a Twilight Zone theme for our radio broadcast, I chose to re-enact a scene from a Twilight Zone episode. The episode I chose was Mr. Garrity and The Graves , which involves a man (Mr. Garrity) arriving in a small town proclaiming he can revive the dead.

As I was recording, I realized this assignment was harder than I initially anticipated. I needed to rewrite the script of the episode a little bit in order to make it work for the assignment. In the original script, Mr. Garrity convinces the men he can actually revive the dead by resurrecting a dog that was hit by a car. However, it would have been very difficult to create the scene of several townspeople surrounding Mr. Garrity in the street using just audio. I planned on doing the whole scene over one recording, however it was difficult to record 4 minutes of audio without lots of mistakes. So, I recited lines in clips, and it certainly shows, as there is varying noise levels and choppy transitions between parts. I worked several hours to create what I have here, however I am still a little disappointed with the result.

Here is the Audacity file. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a screenshot until after I mixed and rendered all the clips into one. Earlier in the process there was a variety of different audio split into several clips, however I combined them into one to simplify the editing process.

Screen Shot 2013-03-17 at 12.14.42 AM

 

 

Facebook Circa 1776

I chose Text Impersonations as one of the audio assignments to complete this week. The task was to, “take a conversation between multiple people over a text based medium, like Facebook or Twitter, and create a audio version of that same conversation.” I decided to use a cleverly made Facebook status, which imagined a status if Facebook existed in the 1700′s.

Here it is:

Screen Shot 2013-03-16 at 11.54.50 PMFound at vinniev.com

To create this audio, I used Audacity to layer my voice recording with the American Revolutionary War Ballad. To convert the Youtube file to mp3 format, I used this youtube-mp3 tool. Once my voice recording was complete, I added in the war song, and edited it to a short 25 second clip with no words, as that could have interfered with the readings of the posts. All in all, I am happy with the result of this project.

Here is my file in Audacity:

Screen Shot 2013-03-16 at 11.56.06 PM

And here is the final product: