Using Sound in a Visual Communication Class
To structure this TWIT, I would like to ask you to help me think through using audio in my upcoming Visual Media Analysis class.
Here are the course goals:
1. Gain fluency with a range of analytic vocabulary and ways of talking about visual media
2. Use social construction theory to attend to historical, contextual, and rhetorical dimensions of visual media analysis
3. Apply theory to examples and use examples to question, extend, and problematize theory
I would like to assign a final project that will demonstrate how well the students have achieved these goals. Here's what I came up with so far. It's the assignment sheet I am working on.
AUDIO ANALYSIS (3-5 minutes)
(Draft--throughout TWIT, let's talk about how might we change/improve this?)
The purpose of this assignment is to test how well you are able to achieve the three major goals of this course.
Step One:
Choose an image or set of images that you feel are controversial and/or historically important. Feel free to use any images we have covered in class, or choose images that we have not covered.
Step Two:
Interview two people about their impressions of the image(s). Be sure that the people you choose to interview are significantly different from one another in terms of age, gender, and cultural background. We will work on desiging questions and carrying out interviewing practices during some of our class time together.
Step Three:
Compose your audio analysis using Audacity--a free sound editing software. Since I do not assume that you are familiar with Audacity, we will have Audacity training and support during class time. If you are already familiar with the software, we will discuss how to best use the in-class training to meet your ability level.
In your audio analysis make sure you:
Are you wondering how in the world you are going to create such a thing? If so, I want to reassure you that in class we will listen to and discuss examples of how people have done different kinds of sound composition and generate strategies for you to use in your projects.
Examples of Student Work
This links come from students in Jenn Garrison's Convergent Media class at UT-Austin. Their assignment was to "pair up with a classmate for this first project and create a 1-2 minute soundscape that represents them to you. You can do this utilizing any style you wish." I am not placing these links here because I think all these examples are "good" ones. Rather, I want to examine these examples in terms of the strategies the students used--this is part of brainstorming for the audio analyses students will be creating in the visual media class.
This Guy Rene
Brooke
It's nice to be broken
I can't cook
Kendra
Manny
Just a Nerd
Places to Listen/Download Sound
Radio Diaries
Talking History
Sound Portraits
StoryCorps
99 Ways to Tell a Story
Famous Speeches
NPR's Lost and Found Sound
Audio Poetry
Acoustic Ecology
Quiet American
Why Audio?
This is a very important question, especially considering that I may have members of the class who are hearing impaired. This makes me aware of my assumptions about who students will be, what they can do, and how they will respond to my assignments.
Going into planning this class, I often wondered how to make it not just a writing class where all of our points of departure are visual. For this reason I had resisted having them write a big final paper.
In my experience, writing a big final paper is not something that usually gets students very excited, and I did not want to smother the kind of excitement that is often generated by visual media with too many academic papers. Besides, I am already having them do six written responses to assigned readings.
But, still, why audio?
I need a reason that is deeper than: it's not a paper.
To try to articulate such a reason, I could say that audio has quite a bit of cultural capital these days--think about the importance of ipods, music-sharing, NPR, MTV, books on "tape", and radio streaming over the internet.
The cultural capital line of thinking seems reasonable, but it still doesn't make an explicit connection to why AUDIO is valuable for VISUAL media analysis.
Here is what I see to be that connection:
Images and other kinds of visual media permeate our lives and we analyze them all the time. Yet the majority of that analysis does not happen in writing. We more often talk about what we see and ask questions of others about what we see. Images are more often the focus of conversation and dialogue than the focus of academic writing. Therefore an audio analysis, particularly one in which students interview others about images, can capture the spoken language of analysis that surrounds visual media.
This is not to say that spoken analysis is an off-the-top-of-the-head or informal activity. A spoken analysis can be very robust. For example, in the assignment I am hoping to get your feedback on students have to use theoretical vocabulary to articulate their ideas, test out the theories with outside sources (the interviewees) and pay explicit attention to deep features of history, context and rhetoric.
This kind of robustness is not necessarily all that different from what students do when they write papers, so we need not completely divorce sound and writing. While the forms may be somewhat different, both can point toward similar kinds of course content.
But what the element of sound in this assignment does is simultaneously replicate and complicate the form of analysis that most often accompanies images in real life: speech.
Issues & Questions
1. Rachel noted that I might need to be even more specific in my assignment sheet. This reinforced my belief that assignment design is very important and that technology alone does not a good assignment make.
2. Nate suggested that if I used i-movie, the students could lay their audio tracks down and place images on the screen in particular ways while their audio plays.
3. Re: #2 above, how much technnology stuff do I want to get into? With multimodality and multimedia it feels like one thing leads to another leads to another. How do I draw the parameters around what I am asking people to do?
4. Don't you think it's kind of odd that I am teaching a visual media analysis class in which the students are doing virtually no visual media production. I consider this an especially important issue because I consider production a form of analysis. Hmmmmm.....
5. How much time is this assignment going to take? If I hand out the assignment at the mid-term, so they can plan ahead, then how much time should I build into the class for this project in the final weeks? Is three weeks enough?
6. If this thing is really to test how well they can achieve the course goals, then it needs to be substantial enough for them to demonstrate that. Is it substantial enough? Is this a fair assignment? How much of the grade should this be?
7. Just in the TWIT itself, not everything went according to plan. How do we handle this, on the fly, when all the students are starting at us? How do we learn to share authority with students who might have insights into how to handle technical difficulties? How do we prepare well enough to forestall problems and be ready to react in productive ways when problems occur (and they will!)?
Here are the course goals:
1. Gain fluency with a range of analytic vocabulary and ways of talking about visual media
2. Use social construction theory to attend to historical, contextual, and rhetorical dimensions of visual media analysis
3. Apply theory to examples and use examples to question, extend, and problematize theory
I would like to assign a final project that will demonstrate how well the students have achieved these goals. Here's what I came up with so far. It's the assignment sheet I am working on.
AUDIO ANALYSIS (3-5 minutes)
(Draft--throughout TWIT, let's talk about how might we change/improve this?)
The purpose of this assignment is to test how well you are able to achieve the three major goals of this course.
Step One:
Choose an image or set of images that you feel are controversial and/or historically important. Feel free to use any images we have covered in class, or choose images that we have not covered.
Step Two:
Interview two people about their impressions of the image(s). Be sure that the people you choose to interview are significantly different from one another in terms of age, gender, and cultural background. We will work on desiging questions and carrying out interviewing practices during some of our class time together.
- Before you interview your subjects you will have to first obtain their informed consent by sharing the scope and purpose of your assignment and inviting them to read and sign an informed consent form.
- Once your interviewees understand and agree to what you are trying to do, you may then record your interview digitally, using a laptop's built-in mike or an MP3 recorder. (Both technologies are available through the CCLI.)
Step Three:
Compose your audio analysis using Audacity--a free sound editing software. Since I do not assume that you are familiar with Audacity, we will have Audacity training and support during class time. If you are already familiar with the software, we will discuss how to best use the in-class training to meet your ability level.
In your audio analysis make sure you:
- offer your own reading of the image(s) using the analytic/theoretical vocabulary we have covered in class
- incorporate clips from your interviews as a way to support, question, and/or problematize your reading of the image(s)
- attend to the historical, contextual and rhetorical dimensions of your image-analysis. These dimensions should come out when you do the two items listed above, but if necessary you might further emphasize these dimensions with music, readings from documents, clips from speeches, sound effect, voice-over, and so on.
Are you wondering how in the world you are going to create such a thing? If so, I want to reassure you that in class we will listen to and discuss examples of how people have done different kinds of sound composition and generate strategies for you to use in your projects.
Examples of Student Work
This links come from students in Jenn Garrison's Convergent Media class at UT-Austin. Their assignment was to "pair up with a classmate for this first project and create a 1-2 minute soundscape that represents them to you. You can do this utilizing any style you wish." I am not placing these links here because I think all these examples are "good" ones. Rather, I want to examine these examples in terms of the strategies the students used--this is part of brainstorming for the audio analyses students will be creating in the visual media class.
This Guy Rene
Brooke
It's nice to be broken
I can't cook
Kendra
Manny
Just a Nerd
Places to Listen/Download Sound
Radio Diaries
Talking History
Sound Portraits
StoryCorps
99 Ways to Tell a Story
Famous Speeches
NPR's Lost and Found Sound
Audio Poetry
Acoustic Ecology
Quiet American
Why Audio?
This is a very important question, especially considering that I may have members of the class who are hearing impaired. This makes me aware of my assumptions about who students will be, what they can do, and how they will respond to my assignments.
Going into planning this class, I often wondered how to make it not just a writing class where all of our points of departure are visual. For this reason I had resisted having them write a big final paper.
In my experience, writing a big final paper is not something that usually gets students very excited, and I did not want to smother the kind of excitement that is often generated by visual media with too many academic papers. Besides, I am already having them do six written responses to assigned readings.
But, still, why audio?
I need a reason that is deeper than: it's not a paper.
To try to articulate such a reason, I could say that audio has quite a bit of cultural capital these days--think about the importance of ipods, music-sharing, NPR, MTV, books on "tape", and radio streaming over the internet.
The cultural capital line of thinking seems reasonable, but it still doesn't make an explicit connection to why AUDIO is valuable for VISUAL media analysis.
Here is what I see to be that connection:
Images and other kinds of visual media permeate our lives and we analyze them all the time. Yet the majority of that analysis does not happen in writing. We more often talk about what we see and ask questions of others about what we see. Images are more often the focus of conversation and dialogue than the focus of academic writing. Therefore an audio analysis, particularly one in which students interview others about images, can capture the spoken language of analysis that surrounds visual media.
This is not to say that spoken analysis is an off-the-top-of-the-head or informal activity. A spoken analysis can be very robust. For example, in the assignment I am hoping to get your feedback on students have to use theoretical vocabulary to articulate their ideas, test out the theories with outside sources (the interviewees) and pay explicit attention to deep features of history, context and rhetoric.
This kind of robustness is not necessarily all that different from what students do when they write papers, so we need not completely divorce sound and writing. While the forms may be somewhat different, both can point toward similar kinds of course content.
But what the element of sound in this assignment does is simultaneously replicate and complicate the form of analysis that most often accompanies images in real life: speech.
Issues & Questions
1. Rachel noted that I might need to be even more specific in my assignment sheet. This reinforced my belief that assignment design is very important and that technology alone does not a good assignment make.
2. Nate suggested that if I used i-movie, the students could lay their audio tracks down and place images on the screen in particular ways while their audio plays.
3. Re: #2 above, how much technnology stuff do I want to get into? With multimodality and multimedia it feels like one thing leads to another leads to another. How do I draw the parameters around what I am asking people to do?
4. Don't you think it's kind of odd that I am teaching a visual media analysis class in which the students are doing virtually no visual media production. I consider this an especially important issue because I consider production a form of analysis. Hmmmmm.....
5. How much time is this assignment going to take? If I hand out the assignment at the mid-term, so they can plan ahead, then how much time should I build into the class for this project in the final weeks? Is three weeks enough?
6. If this thing is really to test how well they can achieve the course goals, then it needs to be substantial enough for them to demonstrate that. Is it substantial enough? Is this a fair assignment? How much of the grade should this be?
7. Just in the TWIT itself, not everything went according to plan. How do we handle this, on the fly, when all the students are starting at us? How do we learn to share authority with students who might have insights into how to handle technical difficulties? How do we prepare well enough to forestall problems and be ready to react in productive ways when problems occur (and they will!)?
posted by Karen Springsteen at
12:08 PM
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