Plugging In: Part II

In part two of my adventure into the world of direct auditory injections, I examined the experience of listening to podcasts whilst going about my daily life.  Would moving from the world of melody to the world of words change my perception of the earphone culture?

Well, I made a number of observations about how my listening habits quickly evolved and how this relates to the types of podcast I am looking to create as part of my new media work, to find out…  

 

Observations: 

 

* Spoken word podcasts are more difficult to listen to whilst moving around, as the background noise can distract, making it difficult to concentrate and therefore follow a thread.  Music, by contrast, being both immersive and background in nature means you can disengage your concentration and then re-engage without loosing much of the meaning.   As a result, podcasts seem to be suited to travelling situations – cars, public transport etc, where interruptions are less likely.

 

* I preferred listening to podcasts on longer journeys (either 30 minute-long Radio 4 programmes or lectures, or a series of shorter pieces, such as extracts from the Today programme or Thought For The Day, which are on average between 2 and 8 minutes in length) whilst I preferred listening to music on shorter journeys.

 

* I generally had to adjust the volume on a more regular basis to hear the podcasts clearly, whereas I didn’t often feel this was necessary with music.  This resulted in a lot more fiddling with the device, which was not always practical.

 

* It was not really possible to achieve the effect of a shuffle with podcast tracks.  This is obviously more of a device issue, but I think it is fairly generic.  With music, I could press shuffle and my playlist would be fed to me with minimum decision-making from myself.  However, I had to actively select each podcast in turn, which again meant more fiddling.  (I may, of course, now find a way of doing this, in which case I will feel like a bit of a spanner!) 

 

Thoughts: 

 

* Most of the podcasts I subscribed to were monophonic, which may explain my difficulty immersing when there are other real world sounds and events to distract.  My own work is polyphonic, involving layers of speech, elements of music and some effects.   Will this help to improve the immersing capacity of my work if the audience are listening on the move, compared to the types of podcast I have been testing here?  Until now, my experience of podcasts both as a listener and a creator has been to engage through a computer, so the experience of listening is very much the same as listening to the radio.  However, by nature podcasts should be engaging whilst on the move, with all the distracting features I have previously noted taken into account.  Maybe the additional layers, which until now have just been slight enhancements to my work, will actually be a more important factor as I design my work for its publication environment.

 

* Most of the podcasts available are information-based, rather than creative.  The podcasts I found that were fiction-based were generally serialisations of longer pieces – usually the equivalent of an audio book by installments, or podcasts of Radio 4’s programming.  Admittedly, I am only searching for podcasts with rss feeds in the iTunes directory, so this may not be an accurate picture of the types of content available in this format.  However, it would be interesting to explore further to see what is out there and why this trend exists.  It is also important for me as I work out where to position my work in order to reach an audience.

 

Well, this has certainly been an experience.  Since carrying out these experiments I have not actually become addicted to either form of constant entertainment.  It is a strange world in which people have such a variety of content injected into their ears whilst performing other functions.  I just like listening alone…

Plugging In

I was fortunate enough to acquire a very very nice new iPhone on Friday, and have since spent most of the week playing with its various features and being generally distracted either by the device itself or envious colleagues.  However, the option to use it as an iPod led me to conduct a previously untried experiment…

 

I often watch people, and have been particularly intrigued by the number and types of people who are plugged in to mp3/portable music devices as they go about their lives in the wider, observable world.  It has always struck me that these people must be experiencing the world in a very different way to those of us with naked eardrums: they effectively have a soundtrack to their movements, like in the films.  Unlike a lot of people I have spoken to on this issue, I have yet to be convinced that this is a bad thing – although I am perfectly sensible to the rudeness it can present under certain circumstances, and the safety risks.  So, armed with my new toy, I decided to try it out for a few days and record my observations.

 

I noticed a variety of things, some of which surprised me and others of which provoked a “Duh! Of course!” reaction.  I shall leave you to distil one from the other:

 

• I prefer to listen to music with my left ear and the world around me with my right, and was often more comfortable with only one earpiece in to this effect

 

• I automatically removed one earpiece (or both) when crossing roads, boarding buses or greeting anyone in passing – no matter how briefly (a standard greeting in this part of the country consisting of: “alright?”… “arr”)

 

• All sorts of visual stimuli seem to sync with the music.  As I type (from the 12:43 London Paddington service from Bath Spa) the clouds of white plumage from the power station funnels at Didcot blend perfectly with In The Bleak Midwinter (arranged by Bob Chilcott), whilst the cows in the fields outside Swindon earlier seemed to walk in time with Defying Gravity from the soundtrack to the musical Wicked, even during tempo changes.  I suspect this is just my brain trying to identify patterns between what I am seeing and what I am hearing, but still interesting…

 

• Outside sounds and the more internal sound of the music create a 2-layer auditory input.  Sorry, I can’t find a better way of phrasing that!  Basically, I mean that the outside sounds around me superimpose over the music (provided the volume is not set too loudly), which creates a strange joint experience of both sound worlds

 

• I am looking around expecting everyone else to hear what I am hearing.  I actually have to visualise a bubble around me to grasp the silence/absence of music around me.  It is quite strange thinking that there are sounds in my ears and head that are not also around my hands or anything else I can see.  This might be getting a bit philosophical, mind.  Actually, now I think about it, I have always had the same issue whilst sitting in a car – particularly on a motorway or busy road in a traffic jam.  I look around me and imagine the chassis of each car acting as the shell of a bubble containing a different mixture of sounds to those I am experiencing.  It seems so odd being close by, but encapsulated in different sounds.  Tangent spotted…

 

• On the more physical side, my eyes hurt a lot more than usual (as I am having to use them to do orientation that I would usually do using my ears) and my ears have a sort of fuzzy skin of ache across them.  This is after only moderate use, on a fairly low volume.

 

Of course, I have focussed on the effects of listening to music so far, so the next step is to test spoken word podcasts.  I’m not sure how easy it will be to concentrate on podcasts whilst going about life on the move, compared to listening to music, but there is one way to find out…

The Day After the Storm

Sunday has been a far more informal and relaxed, with only four of us plus Sue in physical attendance.  We started out testing the technology for our Skype call to Toni, which created some interesting feedback and sound effects as we all logged in to Skype and had a conference call whilst being in the same room.  Unfortunately, Toni did not arrive online, so we progressed by doing a skills exchange looking at both Audacity and Garage Band.

 

The practical use of these programmes to create audio for a range of New Media work seems to be of interest to a lot of people within the MA, although our resident guru Katherine was unable to be present to take us to the next level.  We did manage to establish the basics and some of the possibilities for both of these tools and the effects that can be created in each. 

 

Christine also gave me a personal demonstration of iShowU, a piece of software that can be used to create screencasts or demos from a Mac.  There are equivalent products for PC users – such as Camtasia – which allow you to achieve the same effect.  This tool is extremely useful for e-learning resources, and I think Christine’s use of it for her recent workshop shows how useful a tool it could be for us as collaborative writers.  It seems extremely easy to use, so we may have to play with this as a way of creating resources for each other in online skills exchanges.

 

We discovered that Toni had made it to Skype – an hour early, due to our wonderfully confusing daylight saving time system.  However, she had emailed us a short film that she has been making whilst in Australia.  It was really good to see some of Toni’s work – in her great personal style.  We projected this up onto the main screen for all to enjoy.

 

One of our last exercises with in IOCT space itself was to record a response to Renee’s virtual postcard to us.  We achieved this using the inbuilt iSight on Christine’s laptop and iMovie.   I believe this has since been loaded into BB for Renee and others to see – but we will try to get this visible via the googlegroup so those poor souls like Alison, who have to stand outside the door of BB now, can view this.  We decided to leave in the outtakes, for humorous effect.  However, Chris did take the opportunity to ask Christine for a quick demonstration of basic editing in iMovie, just so we could see how we could have edited this clip to give a more professional impression of our good selves, had we chosen to do so.  This was certainly a useful skill-sharing day for us Mac users, whilst Mary worked to download a clip of a Blondie track on her PC (I am sure the purpose of this will become clear at some point…)

 

We pretty much concluded the day – and indeed the retreat – with a fab roast dinner at the pub across the road from the IOCT.  Sue joined us and gave us all some reassurance about our dissertations and chatted about some of the changes she has made to the course since last year.  She also challenged us to think about what we intend to do once we have completed the MA, and we either pleased her or scared her by our general enthusiasm for continuing study to PhD level. 

 

All that remained to be done was the washing up and the farewells upon return to the IOCT.

becoming a feed-addict

I have noticed over the last few weeks that I am slowly turning into a feed-addict.

It all started with the summer slow down of correspondence via our degree notice board… which lead to my subscribing to a number of blog feeds via Bloglines. This started to replace the notice board in my daily ritual. Then I joined Facebook and started popping in each day to update my status. Today, I have subscribed to 11 new podcast feeds via iTunes, including several BBC Radio 4 programmes that I could very easily hear via my good olde wind-up, if I was organised enough. I wouldn’t mind this, except I don’t own any form of mp3 player, much less an iPod!

The reason for all this? Well, I think the more deeply engrossed in t’internet that one becomes, the greater one’s need to “touch base” in familiar locations. It is like any landscape in that respect: you might really enjoy the thrill of seeing new places and exploring, but there is a huge, comforting relief to be found in finding yourself in a familiar one. You just want to keep returning to make sure that it is all still there, exactly as you left it, and you haven’t missed any vital developments there whilst you have been away.

For now, I do not wish to engage in therapy for this addiction. I am happy to kid myself that my new interest in this plethera of podcasts in purely academic – a study of production quality, length, content, update frequency, etc… However, it is interesting to see a routine developing in which I have a set pattern for checking each of my little cubby-holes on the net for updates. It is like seeing yourself becoming woven into a big piece of fabric, with neat little stitches. I wonder what it will be like when there is no longer a seam between us and the ether…