The Sneeze

For our Comm Lab audio assignment, Meredith and I recorded a one minute monologue and added choice sound effects. We did all of our work in GarageBand, and for two P.C. people, we were very impressed with the app - it kicked ass.

Our source material came from a monologue blogging site and our sounds came from the free sound project.


download it

Pcomp Midterm

Once upon a time, Ilan, Eric, Peng, and Rosie had to do a pcomp midterm project...and they all lived happily ever after. (We hope). Here's all the stuff that should replace the ellipses. For more rough notes, check out our wiki page.

Part One: Ideas

Social Distance Hat
The first idea: a hat that provided information to people about the wearer's personal space, specifically, where others were located in regard to the wearer's personal space. We talked about different "types" of personal space - casual social space, intimate space, etc. One of our goals would be that this would be customizable, so it could be adjusted for cultural differences in defining personal space. Below are Ilan's rough notes and observations:

We talk a lot about differences between different cultures in order to create a tool that enables new social interaction between people from different countries.

Ilan had an assumption: - If you are not fluent with a language you will find it hard to express the degree of your feelings in different words. Most of these people will just know one word that expresses the feeling. For example, some different degrees of the same things: "I like" vs. "I love": "excuse me" vs. "so sorry" "ugly" vs. "disgusting" An application could be to put a pressure sensor that after you say the word you will use to indicate the degree of your feeling regarding this word. For example, say "ugly" and press hard. Many lights will blink to indicate that you meant very ugly (disgusting).

We kept on exploring the differences between cultures. Here are some interesting things we found out. Language: We asked people to make the ANIMAL sounds emitted by children in their country: - Dog: have have(Israel), woof woof/bow bow/ruff ruff (us) , wan wan(japan), wang wang(china), mung mung(korean), au au(brazil), woow woow(hongkong). - Pig: hru hru(russian), oink oink(us),ggul ggul (korea). - Hen: co co co(russian, brazil), pak pak(isreal), gu gu (korea, taiwan), no sound (hongkong). (read more on wiki page ...)

We asked people to make the ACTION sounds emitted by children in their country:
- Door bell: ding (taiwan), ding dong (all other).
- Knock on door: dang dang (china), nak nak (us), tuk tuk (israel), toc toc (brazil), gok gok (hongkong), co co (taiwan).
- Car horn: tutut (belgia), bibi (russia and brazil), baba (taiwan), bipbip (all other).

Body language: - Important issue in body language is distance. The distance is divided in to several parts like: public, social, private and intimate. The distance is mainly decided by the density of people that you're used to. For example, what is regarded by a Chinese person as social distance will probably be an intimate distance for an Australian. An application could be to put a distance sensor on your head that will let the other person in front of you know in which area he's standing regarding specifically your self.
- Body gestures are not part of body language but we use them to "talk" without talking (not unconsciously). We asked people to show the hand gestures for some words: - No: one finger moving right left (israel and taiwan) , all palm moving left right(all other). - Wait: only Israel (actually it's like 7 in chines). - Count numbers: different in Korea, Israel, China. - Quote: only in the US. - Money: like OK (Korea, taiwan), rubbing thumb with fingers (all others).

A "Play with Time" Machine
We decided to abandon the hat idea in favor of a sort of clock that would let users play with time. Here, in Peng's words, is the idea in a nutshell (more rough notes are available on our wiki page):

The concept of this idea is to let people in touch, vision and hearing feel the invisible soft time. So far basically we want to build a transparent round container(maybe of glass), in which is water, in the water there are clock hands, outside and at the bottom of the container is a potentionmeter connected to the clock hands and on the other hand the Arduino, the Arduino is connected to the computer to control a piece of video. People will put their hands into the water to move the clock hands, therefore to control the video going back 10 mins or going forward 1 hour, for example.

Water Harp Music Controller
We also abandoned the "play with time" machine but liked the idea of using water in our project. Thus, our final idea of a sort of interface to control music using water was born. We decided to make "strings" out of water that would allow a user to change aspects of music (tempo, pitch, etc.) by disrupting the water with his or her hand.

Part Two: Building and Problem Solving

To make this work, we needed to make water part of our circuit, so when water was flowing, the circuit would be complete. When a person stuck a finger or hand in the way of the water, the circuit would be open, and a change in the music would occur. So we set out to build a circuit that was completed by a stream of water. I bought a garden hose and some mesh wire while Ilan and Eric rigged up a system using two empty water jugs that would have water flow out of a hole in the hose into the mesh wire, thus completing the circuit and lighting up the led. We soon discovered a problem: regular water was not conductive enough to complete our circuit reliably. Solution: we added salt. Lots and lots of salt. But still, we had problems with conductivity. Frustration!

In class last week, we got feedback and other suggestions for ways to interrupt the water. We liked the idea of having a photocell sense light from an led that would be interrupted by water. This way we could still use water but avoid the problem of having the water complete the circuit. We also decided to scale back the goals of the project to simply have the streams of water play individual tones in the Arduino software instead of controlling music in Max.

So we began to build again. We put an led in a hole in a block of wood near a photocell, which was also inserted in the wood to face the led. Then we drilled a hole perpendicular to those all the way through the wood for the water. The photocell was spitting out readings of around 960 when uninterrupted by water. So we add water and are ready for it to obscure the light. No such luck. The water didn't really affect the amount of light the photocell sensed. We tried making the hole bigger to allow for more water, but this didn't help. I perused the junk shelf in the shop searching for ideas and saw....sprinkles! Halloween sprinkles, to be exact. So I had the idea to color the water by dissolving sprinkles in it. Finally - success! The dark water interrupted the light much better than clear water. We then tried coffee instead of water, which did a wonderful job.

The next improvement was that Ilan got a water pump so we could continuously recycle the same water instead of having to manually pour water into the top dispenser. Then I found the perfect liquid that would let us avoid sprinkles - chocolate syrup! So in our final prototype, we use water with chocolate syrup added to it to darken the water.

As of Friday, Ilan and Eric had our first working prototype. It's a single stream of water that, when interrupted, plays a single tone. To do this, we used the Melody code Tom sent out on the pcomp listserve. We have a single speaker that plays a tone according to the melody code in the Arduino software. This weekend and early this week, we attempted to build a 4-stream model, but without success. So our final (current) prototype remains the single stream model. Peng built us a larger version with room for four streams of water, but we were unable to fix all the problems with this new model before the due date.

Pass the Bits, Please

Response to Shirky vs. McCloud

While reading Shirky's post Fame vs. Fortune, I agreed completely with his points. I totally bought into the idea of "mental transaction costs." An avid user of Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Audiogalaxy, and finally uTorrent, I am a champion of free content. Or at least I was. Since all the supposed "crackdown" on file sharing, I've become more weary of downloading music and have actually been giving iTunes a try. I should mention, however, that I personally have never paid for the music I've downloaded - I've gotten gift cards a couple of times for presents. When I pirate music, I usually feel both guilty (for the artist not being compensated) and somewhat apprehensive (am I going to be arrested?), but neither of these feelings is enough to stop me from doing it again. Probably the only factor that has had any influence on my reticence to download music these days is that I've gotten viruses more than once from infected downloads.

I also found Shirky's explanation of free content as an "evolutionarily stable strategy" compelling. If everyone is offering some song or movie or article for free, then great - I get it for free. If ten people offer it for free and everyone else charges, then great - I get it for free. If only one person offers it for free - same outcome. So the people who offer it for a cost don't sell it - they're at a disadvantage.

The only part of Shirky's argument I didn't agree with was his claim that, "While the author has one particular thing they want to write, the reader is usually willing to read anything interested or relevant to their interests." When I'm looking for a particular piece of content, that's the piece of content I want. If I find some other content I like in the search, that's great, but I still want the thing I started looking for in the beginning. I can see that in some cases this argument might be true: if you're looking for an article about deep vein thrombosis, and you know there's one written by a professor at Harvard, and you don't find that one, but you find one written by a professor at Yale that gives you all the information you need, then you're set. In that instance, maybe you are happy with "anything interested or relevant to [your] interests.' Most of the time, however, I don't think this is the case.

So then I read McCloud's response, Misunderstanding Micropayments, and was confronted with some arguments I didn't expect to find compelling. In several cases, I was surprised. I agreed with McCloud about not settling for content Y instead of content X just because content Y was free (as I discussed above). I also agreed that cost and ease of accessibility play a part in the equation. If I can get content I want for a small fee (under a dollar) and not have the guilt or worry that comes with file sharing, I might do "the right thing," as McCloud suggests.

Regarding BitPass specifically, I checked it out and was somewhat disappointed to find that it didn't seem to be all that McCloud claimed. After searching and reading FAQs, I was never able to get a clear idea of what specific content I would be able to purchase and thus was not enticed to try BitPass. Perhaps that is more of a marketing flaw rather than a flaw of micropayment systems in general, but the end result was the same: I didn't purchase a BitPass card. Last night, however, I did download two albums from uTorrent. I guess in some cases, actions do speak louder than words.

Why don't you just get a video camera?

Susan and I had a fun time shooting photos for this assignment in Washington Square Park on Monday. Susan's idea was to shoot the same scenes from two different points of view, so we walked around the park facing each other and taking pictures. I've never used iMovie or iPhoto or After Effects before, but Susan's a pro, so our final product is pretty impressive for only two days of work. We also discovered a shared love for Ani Defranco and Dar Williams.

• Memorable Quote: "Why don't you just get a video camera?" -- guy playing chess


• Best Picture: Susan with the bird in her face OR Rosie with supermodel wind-blown hair


• Funniest Moment: Susan went to stand by a statue and gave me a big smile like she was posing for a tourist picture before she realized what we were doing and held up my camera to pretend to take a picture at the same time.


• Technical Difficulty: My camera died about halfway through, so the second half of the time we shared her camera and took pictures of each of holding my (dead) camera.

Manipulated Images: Part 2

I can manipulate images, too! Check out our doctored photo of Jon Stewart with Ann Coulter's head on a platter.

Download the psd or view the full-size image.

Also view the source image of Jon Stewart eating the White House cake.

Walter Benjamin & Fascist Art

My one-word reaction to Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" would have to be: "Huh?" I'm very confused. First, let me start by commenting on the extreme density of this article. It's taken me five days to read it because I keep losing interest or concentration or I find myself thinking, "I have no idea what he's talking about." So after re-reading several sections, I foolishly think that I am at least comprehending small pieces of the article. Then I get to the epilogue, and his grand finale is about how fascism uses art to give people a means to express themselves without allowing them to change property or wealth distribution. Should I have seen this coming? War is beautiful, and film is different from paintings, and these concept are related how?

....Okay, so I just reread the preface, and I think maybe that should have given me a clue about the purpose of the article, but I was so confused about WTF he was talking about: "the superstructure" and the "substructure" and..... ??? So I guess I zoned out. I just looked up the article on Wikipedia and found the following:

It was produced, Benjamin wrote, in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be "completely useless for the purposes of Fascism," and instead "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands." (Wikipedia)

And I still don't understand. It feels like maybe I read the preface and epilogue to one article and the body of another. I don't think I'm going to glean anything extremely profound from my reading, at least not until the class discussion. So for the rest of this response, I'm going to ignore the larger picture and instead respond to a couple of the smaller points he discusses.

After studying psychology in college, I lived with two sociologists and discovered that I should have studied sociology instead, so I'm currently pursuing that in my spare time. I've been reading The Sociologically Examined Life by Michael Schwalbe, and the last chapter I read discussed images and representations. He encourages readers to (in pursuit of being sociologically mindful) critically examine the representations that others present, whether they are personal (representations of self) or historical (textbooks, documentaries) or anecdotal (stories, movies, etc.) Schwalbe notes that while we should not be unconditionally accepting of representations, sometimes representations are the only way we can get information. Having not lived in the Middle Ages, the only way I can learn about that era is through other people's accounts and representations of the time. When I was reading Benjamin's article, I was reminded of Schwalbe's point about the necessity of representations. Benjamin argues, not without value, that the aura or authenticity of a work or art is lost when it is removed from its original. The tradition - the cult value - is lost. But Benjamin seems unimpressed by what is gained - the exposure of the masses to the work of art. I agree that hearing the requiem in the cathedral far surpasses listening to it on my iPod, just as seeing an original Picasso is a completely different and more awesome experience than seeing it in a high school art textbook. However, teenagers in the rural Tennessee Valley area who may never get to travel to a major art museum, can still see reproductions of Picasso's work and study them in art classes. Most of us will most likely never walk on the moon, yet we can see pictures of the moon's surface. In 100 years, students will not meet those of us at ITP today, but they might read our blogs and get some idea of who we were. So, while it's not debatable that original art is better than reproductions, I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. (My mother is an economist -- I have the cost-benefit analysis ingrained within me.) Whether this has anything to do with communism or fascism is anyone's call.

Manipulated Images: Part 1

Part 1

When I think about manipulated images, the main area that comes to mind is, of course, fashion models. I'm interested in issues relating to body image and eating disorders, so manipulated images in magazines, movies, etc. are especially relevant. Below are links to some I found online:

This one has a before and after picture of a model.
http://positiveteens0.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/airbrush.jpg

This one is an animated gif, so watch it change to pre and post manipulation.
http://mwynwood.com/gallery/bikini_airbrush_animation.gif

One that I found very interesting, although not related to the above, is this portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The actual photo is of John Calhoun. Lincoln's head was pasted on later. Note: this image was taken from Dartmouth professor Hany Farid's digital tampering site, which has multiple images and useful info about image manipulation.