Pressure Project 3–Allison Smith
Posted: March 3, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Pressure Project 3 Leave a comment »For our third pressure project, we were asked to share a story of importance to us and relevant to our cultural heritage, and to share this story primarily through audio. Additional goals were to tell someone a new story, to make someone laugh, and to make the experience interactive. Alex gave us the freedom to define cultural heritage for ourselves; we all grow up in a specific culture…whatever that may mean to us. I decided to focus on my family’s culture growing up, because I believe that is something that particularly shaped me into the way I am today. I also chose to look up the definition of heritage, as I find definitions very helpful to me. Here’s one definition that stood out to me:
Something transmitted by or acquired by a predecessor
I brainstormed passions that I have that were heavily influenced by my family environment, and the biggest one that stood out to me was art. In my family, there were also several mediums used to engage in art, and I wanted to give the participants that variety in my story telling, so I chose three art mediums that I felt were influenced by my family’s interests. Within that, I discerned what we were specifically passionate about within each medium. As you can see in my notes, I chose Musical theatre because of its immersion in a new world, movies because of the creative processes of facilitating deeper meanings, and music because of how its dynamics could be played with for expression.
One of the overall threads I have seen in art is its deeper meaning and space for interpretation. So, in my different approaches of sharing my stories, I didn’t want to clearly communicate the specific passions of each art medium. I chose to imply what I appreciated through the way it was communicated. These are the sound samples I used for each short story:
Then, I added an intro and transition. Focused on the theme of art, I made the intro a bit more poetic sounding, and the transition was focused on discovery:
Finally, I wanted to make this interactive. In order to explore each medium, I provided a small object that represented it for me, and used those as triggers by connecting them through the MakeyMakey. I used a guitar pick for music, and SD card for film, and lipstick for musical theatre. My peers explained that having this textural connection to the audio helped them connect more to the audio and immersed them more in each of the stories.
In Isadora, I had the intro play with my cue, then opening the gate to let people play around with the different objects. Using the keyboard watcher, each object triggered the sound, and then when the loop ended, it went into the counter. When the counter was between 1 and 2, it triggered the transition audio, and then after all of the audios had been listening, putting a 3 into the counter, there was no longer a transition audio cued.
I originally wasn’t very excited about this pressure project, as I prefer to have more longevity in my projects, and this one was meant to be shorter, and I also am not a huge fan of more light-hearted, comedic projects. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by the enjoyment I got from creating this and seeing it play out with my peers. I’ve attached a video of the full experience.
Pressure Project 3 – Ashley
Posted: March 3, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »My pressure project 3 uses the Makey Makey to create an interactive auditory experience from one of my favorite novels. Our task was to share a story that was important to us and culturally relevant, so I decided to include an excerpt from author Akwaeke Emezi’s “Freshwater”. Emezi is a queer, Nigerian and Tamil writer whose practice is rooted deeply in the footing of Black radical feminism and Igbo folklore.
This novel is an inspiration and was foundational to my research and art practice when I first entered graduate school. For a little bit of background, the book is what Emezi describes as “autobiographical fiction” in which they pull from parts of their own experience and mix it with fiction to create these fantastic moments of storytelling and truth.
For the interactive element, I knew that I wanted to include my copy of the book because it’s so important to me. I returned to using the conductive paint, where I made my own fingerprints as triggers on the pages to activate the sound. The sound is an excerpt of the book, read by Emezi themself. I also wanted to be intentional about where I placed the fingerprint marks, so that they would resemble to act of holding the book as you would naturally.
My Isadora setup was fairly simple. I made a patch that connected the sound player to a keyboard watcher that would trigger it to play. I also had background music that would play when you entered the scene.
Here is documentation of the interaction:
Pressure Project 3 – Yujie
Posted: March 3, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »The pressure project 3 asks us to use audio to tell a story that is related to our cultural origin. This is a broad prompt. I’m a Chinese who live in the United States and I feel cultural differences in the daily bases. But when it comes to tell a significant story, I still feel like no way to start. So, I just spent a few days for brainstorming. Even though I didn’t do anything in the first few days, I became very sensitive to culture related elements. I was preparing my presentation for one of my research papers that studies a Chinese queer dancer. So, it just came to me that I can just tell a story based on my research. One of the dancer’s pieces has historical and contemporary references to a Chinese female legend, Yu Ji. Her story has been told in numerous cultural works of literature, film, opera, and performance. She would be a perfect example for telling the changing gender and sexual ideals and norms in Chinese history.
I decided to use visual clips along with the audio because I try combine four diverse sources from distinct historical period. The videos will help the audiences grasp a rather complicated story. I downloaded videos and sounds from the internet and record my own written script that tells a combined story.
Here is the screen shots of my voice-recording:
Here is the final video-audio project:
Jenna Ko_Audio Assignment
Posted: March 3, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Pressure Project 3
For this project, I decided to narrate my cultural background, specifically in terms of Korean politics. Although there are no politicians in my family, I can say I grew up in a politically active family. We have veterans buried in National Cemetery, and I grew up witnessing my parents and grandparents holding candlelight vigils in Gwanghwamun Square whenever the nation was in crisis. In fact, Koreans in general love to congregate whenever the nation is in crisis. I remember my parents volunteering with millions of other Koreans to clean the coast when we had a huge oil spill. With great passion and strong beliefs, we also have various kinds of social conflicts. With the presidential election coming up, I thought this is the perfect time to share my cultural experience.
The challenge that I encountered was that most of my audience did not speak Korean. Originally, I wanted to gather news clips in English, but there were limited resources. Therefore, I decided to narrate the content by myself with a representative folksong, Arirang, in the background. I imported appropriate images in Premiere with the audio files.
Pressure Project 3, Gabe Carpenter
Posted: March 2, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »My audio pressure project tells the history behind the Russian Nesting Doll or the Matryoshka. I recorded all of the original audio on my Samson C01U microphone and edited all of the audio in audacity. The script that was read during the presentation was created by myself but was based heavily on an article online, linked here. I chose this story because I was born in Vladivostok, Russia, and had a very similar version of the doll displayed in the video on my nightstand. Being adopted from Russia is a huge part of my life and my family’s life. The events currently unfolding between Russia and Ukraine in the year 2022 are very saddening, and I do not condone Russia’s actions in any way by this project.
I created the Isadora network using a sequential trigger, which paused and unpaused a premade rendering of the tape recorder combined with the audio.
The rendering for the project was done in Maya 2022, along with all of the texturing and modeling work.
The final interactive portion of the assignment comes from a system based on a breadboard. A button is placed in the center and bridges together two alligator clips connected to ground and the up arrow on a Makey-Makey. When the button is pressed, the circuit is completed and the trigger is sent to Isadora to play the next part of the video.
The following is the full unsliced video containing all of the audio.