Reading Response #3

Scott MacDonald’s Introduction to “Avant-Garde Film” is a brief synopsis of avant-garde cinema. He discusses avant-garde in the first half in regard to audience reaction, then gives a brief history on the formation on avant-garde cinema. Audiences almost universally dislike and are confounded by avant-garde upon their first viewing because avant-garde shatters our perceptions about what a film is. History shows that avant-garde receives much of its origins from the Lumière brothers and developed in many countries such as Russia, France, and Germany.
I chose to read this article because I am not very educated on avant-garde film. For all its weirdness, I find avant-garde strangely fascinating, possibly because I don’t understand it. My mind tends to thinks rather linearly and has always had an aversion to abstract arts. The main benefits from reading this article are learning some basic avant-garde film history. More importantly I learned to really give avant-garde a chance, if anything, to at least enjoy it for rebelling against the conventional Hollywood cinema.

Video Hardware/Software Review

The Olympus digital camera overall worked like most other digital cameras I have used. The only issue I had with it was that I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the display screen, but that only took a few minutes to figure out. I have an Olympus camera myself, with slightly more features than the one I used on my drift. I’ve also used a video recorder with higher video quality than the Olympus camera. I was able to use the camera to complete the assignment, but when using the video function I had to stick to more well lit areas in order to see anything on the video. In an ideal world, I’d like a camera that took high-resolution images and video in any format I wished. It wouldn’t blur unless I set it to and could take great nighttime pictures and videos.

I used iMovie 6 to edit the video for my drift. I’m very experienced with iMovie and know how to use it inside and out. I have been using the program since my sophomore year of high school when I took a class on television editing. I’ve edited a variety of videos on iMovie and feel comfortable using it. One day I hope to upgrade to Final Cut Pro, but at the moment I don’t have access to it easily.

Reading Response #2

I chose the Wrights & Sites article “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘dealing with the city’. I picked this article over the others because it relates to drift strategries, an issue that I frequently have problems with, drift strategies. This article put forth an interesting strategy involving a deck of cards. More importantly, it identifies the walker as an artist and the environment a compositional catalyst.
The main focus of this article was to put a new perspective on drift strategies. The article claims that there are two main kinds of drifts, functional or passive. A functional drift is when the soundwalk has a goal in mind such as going to a store or work. A passive drift is when the drifter is walking without a particular destination in mind and the method of choosing a path is usually random. These two styles has something in common , in both of them the drifter is not meant to interact with the environment around them and simply observe it as it is. The Wrights & Sights article proposes a new concept in which in the course of a drift, the drifter instead engages their environment and changes it, usually while involving the arts in some way.
I can relate this article to my life because, as previously stated, I have often times have problems with my drift strategies. Many times my drift strategies are afterthoughts that I come up with either spontaneously or it is heavily influenced on the conditions under which I start my drift. Seeing this new concept of a drift strategy could be applied on my next drift.

Audio Hardware Review

I really enjoyed building my microphones by hand. I’ve always enjoyed building things whether it is cabinets or a set for a play (I was in stage crew in high school). I also like that I wasn’t using some high tech piece of equipment and just making due with what I have. That being said, soldering is way harder than I thought it would be. When I watched a demo on building the microphones and it said to solder the wires I just though “No problem, seems easy enough.” After the first twenty minutes or so I quickly learned that soldering is easier said than done. My microphones themselves worked pretty well on my Drift walk I thought. I had some wind noise here and there, but it was a windy day so I’ll cut them some slack. I was able to capture the overall ambience fairly well and I’m happy with the way my recordings of them turned out. I didn’t try to record many extreme close-ups on my Drift, but the ones I did try out were sometime distorted or weren’t particularly clean recordings due to all the background noises the microphones also picked up. I personally don’t know that much about what kind of recording equipment is out there, but my ideal microphone and recorder set up would have ultra wind screens so that there wouldn’t be any interference on the recording. The recording device would have an easy to use interface and mic volume could be easily controlled.

The MiniDisc recorder is infuriating; I would completely hate it if it didn’t make decent recordings. The interface can be very confusing at times. The biggest complaint I have, and I’m sure it’s pretty high on everyone else’s list too, is having to change the record volume to manual every single time you want to take a new recording. This is actually the first device I’ve ever used to solely record sound. I’ve used a common camcorder and extracted audio off of that, and the microphone on my Mac. Using the camcorder is actually easier to use, however it feels like a waste of tape when you’re just using it to record audio. As for the Mac, it’s not the greatest microphone it has built in. It’s very easy to distort the sound and generally it records a rather low quality of audio. I just want a recorder that is easy to use and gets high quality recordings, is that too much to ask?

I edited my audio on the freeware application Audacity. I’d never used the program before this drift, but I found it pretty easy to use even for someone with as limited audio knowledge as myself. I chose to use Audacity mostly on recommendation from others as well as knowing its reputation as a pretty good audio editing program (as far as getting things for free go). I will probably continue to use it on following drifts. I found the interface simple to understand, although I didn’t play around with all of the effects too much because I wasn’t sure what they would do. Then again, if I don’t know what they do I should experiment to find out so I can later use it to my advantage.

Ten Questions

1. What kind of narrative can I tell with my video?
2. What kind of urban artwork (such as graffiti or murals) are present?
3. Are there any interesting houses around?
4. How far can I descend and still see upwards?
5. Is there any interesting discarded trash?
6. Are there any abandoned areas devoid of activity?
7. What parks or playgrounds can be found?
8. How different is the area during rush hour?
9. What sculptures are in the area?
10. What advertisements have been placed around?

My First Drift: A Retrospective

After going out on my first drift, I had a felt decent experience and it was an overall interesting sound walk. That being said, I certainly had my fair share of difficulties. First and foremost, my drift strategy was simply to go east as far as I could. This is a problem since I was unfamiliar with the area and started my drift on Downer Ave and you can only go east for four blocks before you hit Lake Dr and can’t go any further. I was also irritated that my two attempts at trying to record in a unique way didn’t really work out so well. The first try was by putting one microphone in each side of a stop sign in hopes each mic would pick up a very different sound. What ended up happening was one mic picked up a bunch of activity and the other didn’t pick up anything other than white noise. The other attempt was by putting the microphones in a hole in a stone sculpture. The recording didn’t come out as anything interesting and was kind of disheartening.

I found myself at some point taking a recording on a path by Lake Michigan by a bunch of shrubbery to capture audio of some of the bugs in the area. While I was making the recording I felt strangely at piece just listening to the surrounding ambient noise. The mix of wind, waves, birds, and bugs was very pleasant. I just closed my eyes and breathed for a few moments of piece. I’d like to say that I had more than just that one moment of serenity, but I can’t honestly say that I did. I was very focused on what I was doing and was overall just irritated by my lack of planning in my drift strategy. I was always walking somewhere or thinking about how the recording was going or what I was going to do next. My mind was too busy to relax.

I had a few unexpected things happen to me over the course of my project, too. Only one unexpected thing happened during the drift itself. While I was recording a mix of a sprinkler to my left and a man hedging bushes straight ahead of me, a fairly large dragonfly zipped right past my microphones and I captured the audio of it. I was pretty excited about that. Once I’d gotten back inside and in front on a computer I was surprised to find that none of my recordings were particularly terrible. All of them were pretty balanced and didn’t get so loud that they were distorted. My biggest surprise though was once I had finished my editing I discovered through peer reviews that two of my recordings that I hadn’t really thought too much of turned out to be my best ones for various reasons (good sense of space, relaxing, etc.)

I can’t pinpoint one particular part of my drift experience that really affected me. What really gets to me is that through the experience of doing a drift I can see the places where I made mistakes and how to fix them next time around. My drift strategy for example, I will make a point to put myself in a more interesting situation as well as a more random method of choosing a destination (I’m currently thinking of rolling dice). I have a much better idea of how to use my microphones effectively, as well as what to listen for in the editing room. This is frequently how I react to anything I do artistically, I’m never satisfied with the work I put out when I care about what it is I’m doing

Sound Organization

The article I chose was The Future of Music: Credo written by John Cage in 1937. This article interested me more than the others because it wasn’t all about drifting or telling you to listen to everything around you. I also liked the style the article was written in, with two things being said at the same time. It’s as though the author wants to bombard you with information like we are bombarded with sound everyday.

Cage begins the article by explaining how noise is everywhere all the time no matter where we are in all forms and of different asthetics. He claims that what we refer to as music can be termed “organization of sound”. He believes that the future of music will be made up of electrical instruments, instruments that have more capabilities than more traditional instruments such as piano or violin. We will also begin to move away from conventional hamonies and rhythm. He believes that this new experimental music will be the music of the future.

This is relevant to me as a media artist because I play around with sounds using the technologies of the new millennium. I can do so much more with sound than they could do back in the 1930s. It’s also important as an artist to try an experiment with new ideas and attempt to use new methods outside of the ordinary. I will be looking forward to the future of music as well as sound.

The first soundwalk

On Wednesday September 10th, 2008, I went on my first sound walk in a group of approximately 10 to 15 other indivuals. For those of you may not know, a sound walk is when you walk outside and listen and focus on the noises around you. I plan on taking recording equipment on a future walk, but I just wrote down the various noises I heard. We started our walk in Lake Park just off N Lake Dr. in Milwaukee, WI and continued through various side roads. It was difficult to make out a wide variety of sounds due to the close by traffic, there were moments on the side roads however where it did get rather quite and you were really able to listen to everything around you. I was unsure if I was really able to walk quietly, while I tried to, the noise of everyone else in the group walking masked any noise I my feet were making. We started the walk by plugging our ears to see what we could hear. For the most part the only thing I could hear was my pulse, a stretching noise (presumably the tendons in my hand), a stick breaking, and faint traffic (particularly diesel engines).
My list of things I heard on my walk is was follows:
• Boots Shuffling on Pavement
• A Motorcycle Engine Accelerating
• Truck Tires Squealing
• Sticks and Leaves Crunching
• A Brief Bird Chirp
• Leaves Blowing in the Wind
• Distinct Talking
• Walking in the Grass
• Soccer Ball Being Kicked
• Leaf Blown on Ground by Wind
• Airplane Flying Low to the Ground
• Laughter
• Noisy Muffler
• A Strange Noise to my Left, like a deep whistle
• Metal Bouncing
• Scraping Behind me (distant)
• High-pitched noise to my left
• Paper Shuffling
• Beeping
• Tripping
• Distant Dog Bark
• Crickets Chirping
• Water Running
• Faint Child Scream
• Mo-Ped Whizzing by
• Talking (distinct yet faint)
• Planks hitting Planks
• Kids Squealing (Close By)
• Hitting Hollow Plastic
• Dog Collar Jingling
• Table Saw Running
• Water Splashing
• Water Dripping
• Bike Spokes
• Loud Beeping
• Bus Letting Off Pressure
• Flags in the Wind
• Church Bells Ringing (distant)
After going on my first sound walk, I feel more prepared to attempt to collect sounds. I have a better idea how to open my ears and mind to the noises around me and I think that is going to help me a lot as a media artist in all forms of sound management. Collecting, editing, and general listening skills.