https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14QpkIvvTQd6k4Z3RCl0xV1gE6HxEwmQF5Nq-HASq-_o/edit?usp=sharing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wog-34Kbb0

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Chiptune music lately—in part because it’s something I’m looking to write about in the future but also because I’ve recently started exploring composing music through trackers like MilkyTracker and LSDJ. The sound-visual relations brought up in Rickert/Salvo’s piece has got me thinking about the Demoscene/Chiptune communities and gatherings; in early fall, I went to a small Chiptune and Glitch Art festival in Evansville, IN, where musicians created music with a variety of electronic implements (including, in most cases, the Nintendo Game Boy) while visual artists used various programs to create dynamic, pixely, glitchy art in real time to pair with the music. The whole things was a super low-budget, hacked-together mess and the experience was incredible.

One of the things that struck me about Rickert/Salvo’s article was the part on GarageBand. I find really interesting their dissatisfaction with how unintuitive or difficult GB is to use—which, don’t get me wrong, it definitely is. But compared to the audio/visual trackers that are favored in the Demoscene/Chiptune communities, GB is incredibly user friendly. Part of the reason these trackers are so difficult to use is because they’re hacked together ROMs—with limited resources, it’s really difficult to create a user-friendly interface. And while there are no shortage of more friendly audio production tools that can produce the same kinds of sounds, these communities take a certain level of pride in using these hacked-together music-making programs instead. But even though the interface is not friendly, it still allows for the type of re/composition that Rickert and Salvo point out as being generative with GB.

The readings for today were significantly “better” – in the sense that I appreciate this conversation on the integration/modality of sound/music in composition classrooms and the comparison of the processes of product creation. I wonder, though, why there wasn’t more conversation on music varieties/genres (in Rickert & Salvo’s piece), more about collaboration, and a little more discussion on this idea of feedback in music and how that relates to feedback in composition. Nonetheless, here are my thoughts:

1. I’ve never not considered music in the classroom, music in composition, music in language. Perhaps that has much to do with my upbringing: speaking two languages at home and “hearing” how they sound different – different rhythms and tones, and playing instruments singing. Writing/playing music are cousins, if not twins, in my eyes.
2. I’m very intrigued by this idea of feedback in music and how that relates to the composition classroom: turning something that was once perceived as “noise” into a value that can add to the overall process. I wonder if our efforts in providing feedback to our students could be aided by looking into this model a bit more.
3. Nothing about music is individualized: there is always some form of collaboration, or cooperation if nothing else, that is at play. I wonder how this perspective could inform our writing pedagogy. How can we scaffold more collaborative work into the classroom?

As a musician, I find myself thinking a lot about the Rickert and Salvo article, especially their discussion of musicians as being “at the forefront of the new media revolution…artists and musicians have been collaborating and mutually influencing each other, creating feedback loops and immersive media worlds, for quite some time…there is a technological component to these extensions, dispersions, and feedback loops” (298). I feel like the collaborative nature of these technological, aural feedback loops are really important, especially when we think about “how we hear and experience sound” and how interrogating this experience “promises far more for composition, invention, and pedagogy” (299), which is what McKee mentions as well:

With the continued development of digitized technologies, sound is also becoming integral to our writing processes as well. Digitization and the increased convergence of computerized technologies enable the integration of visual, aural, and textual elements with unprecedented ease…How should we develop understandings of the sounds in which we’re immersed and that increasingly shape how and what we write? Given this move to even greater multiple modalities in composition, what are writers and writing teachers to do? (336)

And after reading all this, in thinking about how sound and music shapes how and what we write—because I know that playing music has definitely shaped the way I write—I think the collaborative nature of music and how this type of collaboration might inform our writing processes is what I really want to hear (pun intended) more about in and after these readings. And I’m wondering how our understanding of music as a process of meaning-making might inform the way we think about writing as a process of meaning-making.

While reading the Rickert and Salvo piece, and thinking on this concept of the contribution of the prosumer, I kept thinking: what a perfect thing to read when also focused on games, but especially for me, since I’ve been thinking a lot about what players bring to the table and add and how they create within worlds. But in particular, this piece made me think of the zombie game Left 4 Dead’s AI director: the system observes player interaction with the world and alters the world to create the experience, changing enemy spawns, item locations, and even closing/changing pathways in the sequel. But there’s a second director that isn’t spoken of as much, that only controls music. The regular AI director can insert cues of nuance, tone, and tension – sound effects and such – as well as music, and a second director controls music on a player scale (personal events, etc.). It’s a very complex system, and within that, there are the jukeboxes.

The jukeboxes scattered throughout the game in Left 4 Dead 2 can be trigged by players and will play different songs, and those songs may create events of their own. For instance, the chorus of a particular song triggers a horde event, in which the undead come pouring en masse onto the screen (though most of them just play, and may trigger hordes with nothing but the sound). You don’t have to trigger the jukeboxes, and you can’t predict what song will play when you do, but it’s interesting to think about alongside this article, because the game controls the songs, but the player controls the play, and the game then responds based on player interaction – it’s all feedback and distortion and incorporation, all the time. That’s what creates the experience.

One of the things I find myself continuing to think about is Gitelman’s argument that “all new media emerge into and help to reconstruct publics and public life, and that this in turn has broad implications for the operation of public memory, its mode and substance. The history of emergent media, in other words, is partly the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved—written down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned—and why” (26). This idea of “the history of history,” of who gets to be preserved, and how, and why, seems pretty interesting, especially the fact that thinking about emergent media’s role in all this allows us to consider how it is that an emerging form of media can be “less a causal agent of change than it [is] fully symptomatic of its time” (29). And I think that’s it’s interesting that Gitelman explores, specifically, aural media and the manner in which “the early history of sound recording makes visible the ways in which new media emerge as local anomalies that are also deeply embedded within the ongoing discursive formations of their day, within the what, who, how, and why of public memory, public knowledge, and public life” (29).

As someone who collects records, this has me thinking about the tangibility of sound and how aural texts might be made material through something like tinfoil—or an iPod—for as Gitelman explains, “Tinfoil offered a new, precise sort of quotation, in effect, or a way of living with the question of quotation as never before. To put it another way, the tinfoil souvenirs suggested that oral productions might be textually embodied as aural reproductions, rather than as the usual sort of graphic representation, spelled out and wedged between quotation marks on a page” (40). I wonder if this speaks in any way to Levy’s discussion of podcasting as a “democratizing agent” (246); are podcasts, like tinfoil “textually embodied as aural reproductions,” and is it this embodied reproduction that helps it to be this democratizing agent?

As I read the Kishonna Gray piece a few weeks ago I found myself considering the lack of empirical research in much of the gaming studies and computer based readings from this semester. Arguably, this absence could be the fault of writing studies’ fraught relationship with research methodologies, but the absence of research could also be understood in a lighter way–writing studies is always under development. The field is always looking to the next new cool thing to establish its relevancy and value to each new generation of writers and research. This is how we come to discuss interdisciplinary topics such as film, advertising, music, and video games in the English department.  Our field’s turn to new media (including the typewriter and computer, as readings from early in the semester revealed) is therefore a reflection of rhetoric and composition’s desire to become part of the “masses.” Near the end of the chapter “New Media Publics,” Lisa Gitelman says “the social meanings of new media are not technologically determined in any broad sense” (56).  She provides this statement after presenting a chapter about tin foil and under-appreciated sound devices that seemingly have nothing to do with writing, composition studies, or play as we have  discussed all semester, but the conversation Gitelman presents connects us back to the presentation of mass media and teaching the masses. Gray’s desire for more diverse and realistic representations in video games also reflects an acknowledgement that “the masses” has also changed. Perhaps it is time our fields caught up to these new publics.

Key pithy quotes:
Lisa Gitelman: “One of my points is that all new media emerge into and help to reconstruct publics and public life, and that this in turn has broad implications for the operation of public memory, its mode and substance. The history of emergent media, in other words, is partly the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved –written down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned–and why” (26).

Steven Levy: “the iPod was suddenly at the center of two of the biggest and most disruptive trends in digital media: a grassroots uprising of a wisdom-drenched crowd of the self-appointed and an à la carte disintegration of the traditional packaging of broadcast and cable programming. Would the iPod destroy the networks by allowing us to cherry-pick and shuffle all our media, the same way it lets us shuffle our music?”

Links that may become useful/interesting sidetracks within the discussion to come:
check out these fascinating old digitizations of tinfoil recordings: http://www.tinfoil.com/
and compare these versions of history to the ones Gitelman and Levy tell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting

Questions to talk through:
★ “Disruptive” and “innovation” are quite big buzzwords these days and it seems STEM and business students especially are often pushed toward making big, game-changing, attention-getting moves in their fields and careers. But not all “disruptions” or “innovations” are worth the buzz, necessarily. How do we help students navigate and question the ways their ideas will change the world? What kinds of projects might train them in how to be thoughtfully and conscientiously disruptive?

★ Some of you assign podcast projects to your students. How could Levy’s and Gitelman’s pieces supplement these assignments in English 106? in other writing classes?

★ Gitelman describes how “the exhibitions provided a playful and collective engagement with good taste. In making their selections for recording and playback, exhibitors made incongruous associations between well-known lines from both Shakespeare and Mother Goose … They could participate together in the enactment of cultural hierarchy” (35). Where do we see this kind of participation and enactment online today? What cultural hierarchies emerge in networked/virtual spaces?

★ (Sorry for those of you not in posthumanism class with us, but I’m gonna make you think about materiality.) This class is called Computers in Language and Rhetoric, and for some reason it can be easy to leave physical, material, embodied things off to the side when wireless connectedness and ideas and words and virtual realities are so exciting. Where is materiality important when thinking/teaching/researching this kind of stuff? Where could/should it be more important than it seems to be here and now?

An Activity about Public Memory-ing and Multimedia-ing:
Pair up and assign roles: 1 person to scribe, 1 person to digitize. Extra people might double up on roles, or simply contribute discussion bits.

As you discuss the questions above, the scribe should document the discussion using ONLY a sheet of tinfoil and any chosen implement of inscription.

When you get bored enough of the questions/discussion, hand off your tinfoil transcript to be digitized. I am leaving the digitization/conversion process up to you. Somehow transfer the discussion notes made by the scribe into this google doc (handily repurposed from the day Sammy led discussion back at the end of September).

Feel free to comment on and reply to other groups’ efforts once your own tinfoil inscriptions are transferred. We will see how the conversation evolves (or doesn’t?) as it moves between/across media….

I’d forgotten about CB radio, honestly; it’s not something I have much occasion to think about, unless it comes up in a movie. But while reading Levy’s article, I was suddenly reminded of hearing about the very uses he was talking about, back when I was a kid, but I was also reminded of growing up during those nascent stages of the contemporary Internet and how incredibly exciting it was to make a website. Join a chatroom. Find a forum. That desire to connect with others was so strong that it’s always surprised me that people still tend to fall back on the idea that digital connections aren’t real. That even though meeting people online for dates has become wildly common, there remains some lingering cultural pushback around the phenomenon. But then it occurred to me that it’s only been twenty years or so, forty since those days of the CB wilds, and as quickly as technology changes now, attitudes aren’t always quite as fast. Still, it’s fascinating to think about that desire for connection laid against all the ways we also try to deny (or decry) it.

I was also much interested in his short history of educational podcasts here. I was a big listener of iTunes U casts for a while, particularly creative writing lectures, because they expanded access to things like writers’ retreats and conferences that I’d never be able to afford. Sure, they lack the human component, but to have the recorded lectures there, available while I did dishes or cut the grass or whatever, was such a revelation to me before I came to grad school.