Josh and I went off campus and went downtown to Easton to film the sound for this assignment.

We filmed the sound of a bad interview.

We filmed the sound of the water from the center fountain.

We filmed Josh playing guitar.

We filmed the sound of traffic in the circle downtown.

Unfortunately our audio was unable to upload onto the blog.

Josh and I made the bad interview sound sound bad by recording it outside. Josh was far away from me so you could barely hear me. The outside noises were definitely a major contributor in making it sound bad.

For our “bad interview audio,” we first played around with the idea of having music play in the background to overshadow the voices in the interview, but then we remembered back to class when you said that putting the microphone on auto will pick up white noise, so we wanted to try that. We also played around with the volume/input levels to make the audio sound loud when its not. When I accidentally hit the recorder against the desk during the interview, I didn’t stop to rerecord or fix it. Also, I held the microphone close to my mouth so that it would pick up my voice loudly and not pick up so much of the voice of the person I was interviewing. All of these audio aspects made the interview a bad one, because the audio quality was so weak that it interfered with the content of the interview.

When I was getting the non-human world and man-made world audio recordings, I went to the Delaware River. The non-human audio is the sound of the water of the Delaware River rippling and splashing. The man-made world audio consists of cars driving past the river on the road, one car blasting music with the windows down.

When I was getting the human world audio, I went to the library. I didn’t want the people I was recording to know that I was recording them for fear that it would sound unnatural if the people were aware. So, I held the mic over the railing of the library on the second level pointing the microphone downward to capture the audio of the chatter/murmuring of people in Skillman Cafe on the first level. I had to increase the input level so it would pick up the sounds from afar, and turn down the volume so that I wasn’t hearing the playback too loudly.

Julia Ciciarelli and Grace Veghte

Group: Lisa, Andrea, Shreya.

Audio of bad interview: We were sitting in Farinon and asked Andrea to respond to the question of how she feels about the DACA situation, how she is dealing with it. Since there were a lot of people around us and music was playing in the background, there is a lot of background noise. We recorded with an iphone:

Audio of human world: someone eating an apple

Of non-human world: sound of stepping on leaves and the wind

Of made world: we thought of made world in terms of technology so we recorded the sound of the microwave

I was very moved by the part in Grizzly Man where Herzog films himself listening to the tape of Treadwell’s death. In our class, students were arguing that it was not Herzog’s place to tell Timothy’s mother if she should or should not listen to it, but I disagree. It was not like he was forcing her to do what he said, he was just giving her advice. It is like when you are first trying a food and you ask someone else to taste it first. Maybe the persons response after eating the food will be “I don’t think you will like this.” The person is not telling their friend to not eat the food, just simply giving them a heads up before they dive into the meal.

I particularly liked the way this scene was executed because the camera’s focus was all on the woman face and the only thing that was seen of Herzog was the back of his head. I think it was a good move on Herzog’s part to not include the audio of Treadwell’s death in the film because it would have made the film gory, which is not what it was intended to be. Viewers would have been surprised and maybe offended if the real audio was included in the film. It is true that Herzog is making a documentary on Timothy Treadwell, but I do not believe that not including the audio of Timothy’s death made the film any less legit.

I enjoyed the exercise we did in class where we were divided up in groups and had to make a timeline of the least to most offensive things a filmmaker could do. It was interesting to go around to the different groups to see the different variations between order of offenses and to find out why they placed each offense where they did. Basically when it comes down to it, it depends. Everyone has probably had different experiences with all of the offenses, which would cause one person to put “returning equipment late” higher up on the list than others.

There were two wrongdoings that particularly caught my eye. The first was “making a movie and not inviting people to the screening.” I think that this just depends on the circumstances. When people make films at Lafayette that will be screening, I do not think that it is offensive if someone who is in the film is not invited. Of course they should be invited, but I feel as if most students would not care if they were in a film and were not invited. (I am just speaking personally, maybe there are a handful of people who would care) On the other hand, if a filmmaker is creating a huge motion picture and an actor is not invited to the screening, this would be a lot more offensive. There are lots of planners for events like these, and if a person planning this sort of event forgets or even unintentionally does not invite an actor/actress, it would cause a huge scene. Going back to film screenings at Lafayette, maybe a student simply forgot to invite their subjects; this would not happen with a wide-reaching film.

The second that caught my eye was the offense that said “depicting females as dumb and helpless.” All of the people who said that this was a horrible thing to do were also the people who consume this sort of media themselves. In almost every comedy, the female character is depicted in this way, and the same with a lot of older Disney films. If we are the ones who think that its horrible to show this sort of sexism, then why do we consume tv/movies that show just that?

In short, we are aware some of these offenses are wrong, yet we chose to do them anyway.

We are Laura and Devin. This is our project. Our first task was deciding what to record. This meant deciphering what each of the audio prompts was asking for. The one we struggled with the most was the made-world because the human and non-human world seemed fairly straightforward. What does the “made-world” entail? Clearly it must be something different from the human and non-human world. We decided the made-world is a world that is created by humans and would not have existed without us. It is able to function without human stimulus. The fountain was built and implemented into Muhlenberg’s campus by someone, but it stands alone and produces its own sound.

We took out both the zoom voice recorder and the Tascam recorder so we could decided which one we preferred. We ended up recording our sounds using the zoom voice recorder. It was fairly easy. We messed with the input volume setting to try to capture more sound, especially when recording the non-human world (wildlife). After we recorded everything we connected and uploaded the media to Devin’s macbook using the usb connecter. We realized we needed to export the media from Quicktime (wav) to m4p to get it on the blog. Hope it worked!

Bad audio explanation:

Bad audio:

Human world (coffee steamer):

Made world (fountain):

Non-human world (wildlife):

“Feeding Time” (Making #3: Instagram Story)

I document important life events like weddings, vacations, graduations, new dogs and new apartments. I always feel its necessary for me to capture the details of these events on camera, so my future self can be nostalgic. I have a horrible memory, so when I find myself wanting to look through old photographs or videos, what stands out to me are the ordinary moments. Weddings and vacations are easy to picture in my mind because the images have emotional weight, making them harder to forget. The random pictures I’ve collected of family and friends, particularly beautiful streets, and a million other everyday items that in the moment seemed picture-worthy, make up the ordinary bulk of my life. These images are often the most interesting to look at try to remember. I think that’s why letters, postcards, newspapers and family photos always interest me most in museums. I like imagining the ordinary life of people who’s world looks/looked completely different than mine. When I travel I like to make movies out of clips I’ve taken throughout the trip. That way I can remember still images, but also better imagine the sounds and movement of a place. I did this during my abroad semester in Bhutan and my following trip to Vietnam. These videos have allowed me to relive some of the best moments of my life.

I major in Environmental Science with minors in Political Science and Sustainability. Most things that I do are through the lens of these subjects. That includes just the general way I take in the world around me. For example, when I look out my dining room window right now, I notice the beautiful vines that are growing on the outside of the house. I also notice that they are creeping their way in between bricks and windowpanes, meaning in the winter that house will need more propane to stay warm. When I do things there is always a cost benefit analysis going on in my mind of how environmentally conscious I could or could not be. This applies to small things like taking out the trash, taking a long shower, eating meat; it’s also present in my larger life decisions like what job to apply for. Will I contribute more to a sustainable human-planet relationship by doing laboratory science, working for non-profits, or reaching out to the larger populous through film and story telling? I’m taking this class as a way to challenge myself and my presumed role in combatting and adapting to climate change. If I could tell the story of a specific place in the Lehigh Valley, it would be the Lehigh Gap Nature Center. Its history as a Zinc factory, Superfund site and now reclaimed natural area is fascinating. The visuals of that place are also stunning and communicate the complex reclamation process of a toxic waste site into a nature reserve. The problems that the Nature Center encounters are also fascinating to me, like how the trees they planted on the landfill are great for reducing erosion and keeping the toxic waste under the soil, but also create an outlet for toxics as leaves absorb underground zinc deposits and are blown into the nearby river, spreading toxic contamination to surrounding areas.