What To Give…
I am thinking about two possible choices for this project: one, to do something like “50 People, 1 Question” with the question – If you’re going to give away something, what would it be and who would you give it to? Why? Or two, to do the audio assignment “Sing My Life” found in DS106 (not literally sing, but a song that describes my life and I can relate to it). Even though the latter seems more interesting to do, I think it will be more feasible to do the former. I might change if I cannot compile the answers from random people that I will question to get a point/purpose/message across.
The question that I pose before is an inspiration from the word “give” while listening to Ira Glass’s “20 Acts in 60 Minutes” in class. I thought that as human beings, we’re very selfish creatures, always wanting something for ourselves and are willing to rob it from others. So what if the situation is reversed, where instead are asked to give something away? I expect that there would be two sides to this: one, people who will give away something worthless that they don’t want or need, or two, people who will give away something precious that they value and want a special person to have it.
Depending on the answers I get, my direction towards how I want to present this project will be different. If I get a lot of answers of people wanting to give away something because they don’t want it anymore, it would confirm what I thought human beings are likely to be – selfish. And so, I might take a sarcastic approach to how I want to present it, to show the ugliness of the human heart. Or if I get a lot of answer of people wanting to entrust something precious that they have to someone they care about, I would use music to try to bring out the nostalgia and affections that exists between human beings.
For my question, I want to question very diverse people. There’s an event coming up that I will attend on Oct. 12-14 called NYAF (New York Anime Festival). There will be many people from the city and other states attending this event. There will definitely be terrible background noises because of the amount of people gathering, but I think it will be worth a shot. That said, I will be trying to interview people in school or maybe on the street as well. (I only have my phone… hopefully it can get the job done…)
Most of the talking will be directly from the recordings I get from interviewing people. I imagine the segments to have about 15 to 25 seconds for each of the selected persons in the Audio-Essay. That would mean I will have anywhere from nine to twelve different voices in my piece.
I actually do not know where I will exactly record my audio clips. But as I mentioned above, it would be either from people in Baruch College, on the streets around Baruch College, and/or in NYAF (which I believe will have lots of background noises).
To make this possible, I will be using my phone’s voice recorder, sound editing software (Audacity or GarageBand), and various soundtrack(s) that might come in handy to set up the mood of my Audio-Essay. I haven’t decided on which soundtrack(s) or song to use yet; it might become clearer as the project progresses.
As for the questions that I have:
1. Do we need to create some sort of citations for the sounds or songs that we use or can we just use it? The only reason I’m asking this is because I am thinking of using soundtracks from Japanese songs (of course, these will only be instrumentals).
2. What does the draft due on Oct. 15 entail? Does this mean that we should have the “draft” of the sound file? If I understand this, the only written work to hand in is the Draft Cover Letter. Correct? I’m a bit concern because I plan record much of my materials will be recorded in NYAF which is very near the due date for the draft. It will be nice to know what we need for the draft beforehand so we can prepare it properly.
4 responses so far
Hi Gen:
On question One: you can feel free to use songs in your video, but know that there is a chance you may be subject to a take down request. It all depends on how active the copyright holder is in monitoring the airwaves. As long as you’re prepared for this and have a backup file that you can give to Prof Smith that isn’t online, you’ll be fine.
And– always, always cite the material that you’re using. You can do that at the end of your recording (“this piece borrowed sections of Carly Rae Jespen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Radiohead’s “I’m a Creep”.”), or perhaps in the text of the blog post where you embed your audio file.
Thanks for you comment Luke.
Gen,
This is a great proposal! I like the fact that you’re not just asking questions but you’re going to unify them under a central theme, and an interesting one at that. You should probably start asking some people just to gauge what kind of response you’re going to get. That way, you can start developing your theme more thoroughly. I’m pretty excited to see what you come up with at the anime festival. Good luck!
This is very interesting, I’m just curious; is the ‘something’ a physical object? Or is it completely up to interpretation, because having such wild answers may end up being either hard to compile or amazingly interesting. It all depends on the answers that are given.
Also, I like your idea to bring the questioning to the NYAF. I have never heard of it before, but as long as there is a diverse group of people then it sounds perfect. It might be in your best interest to get more familiar with the audio softwares in order to cut out some of the background noise. And, I’m sure you are aware by now, but if we can get an audio recorder from the school then that will be better than your phone. I like the idea, it may even be a type of experiment to prove that humans are innately evil in their ways. I expect interesting results from such a question like that, good luck.