[credit crunch craft]

I've heard of re-purposing record album covers as wall art. I suppose you could also use the smaller cardboard covers that come with cassettes (if anyone still has these kicking around). But what do with the actual tapes that remain?

Well, Mary over at the Audiobooker Blog links to an interesting idea by iri5. iri5 has a set of "ghost in the machine" flickr photos which show some excellent examples of eco-craft. I feel some creativity coming on....

[sonic and digital literacies]

As I think about the kinds of things I'd like my pilot group to read while enjoying various brain scans (this is an experiement in the works) I find myself trying to make sure I'm not too text-centric. I'm working in the online environment (mostly) and that means there is often recourse to images, sounds, video, text (which in my experience is often quite visual too) and of course there's some kind of haptics. But I find I almost forget about sound...sounds odd saying that because as I write I am listening to myself, how can I *forget* about sound? Is it more likely that I'm so immersed in sound that I just navigate through its presence (as is the case for certain students according to Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks) Cornstock and Hocks ask how might educators engage this kind of sonic sensitivity in their own writing (composition) classrooms. It seems that this might be similar to what Ximena Alarcon is doing with her research into sonic environments and memory. Ximena did her ph.d at DMU (in Music Technology and Innovation.) and now she is working on a Leverhulme Trust - Early Career Fellowship 2007 - 2009. For her ph.d Ximena created an ethnography based artwork. "Twenty-four volunteers participated in the project, sharing their (deep) feelings, spontaneity, curiosity, interest, and passion for discovering how sound is important in their life. Sounds included in this project have been selected by them, after a process of travelling, recording, listening and remembering."

Ximena's current project stretches the sonic environment to Paris and Mexico, this time comparing these results with the London one's which formed the base of the ph.d.

There are blogs devoted to Ximena's field work in Paris and Mexico and on the Mexican blog there's an interesting comment from one of the volunteers. She has just listened to sounds from the London Underground while navigating Ximena's "ethnographic artwork." She notes the sound of the bells (doors opening and closing I presume) and notes that hearing the sound means she visualises the tube" in action" (my translation):

"Lo que llama en particular mi atención son las campanas en la parte del corredor, la combinanción de imágenes y los sonidos hacen realmente imaginarte un mundo en moviemiento"

I wonder if this synesthetic response is something that might be made visible with brain scanning research and is it something we (as educators) can work into our teaching? I suppose this aligns with Ong's thinking that sound "emanate[s] from a source here and now discernibly active, with the result that involvement with sound is involvement with the present, with here-and-now existence and activity" (qtd in Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks)

I'll look forward to reading what parisienne/parisien commuters think.

[learning on screen - part quatre]

"How to Write and the Question: Is it Still Necessary to 'Write'?"
Neil Rose, Sonic Arts Lecturer at Plymouth College of Art and Design (his myspace page)

"Writing is important but putting pen to paper seems not so..."

What is Audio Writing? - radio documentary, radio play (The Archers), more examples in the electro-acoustic (think K. Norman, J. Cardiff etc...)

Although audio writing comes out of a history it is still difficult to assess.

How to quote in audio? What are the quotation marks? Having another voice say the quote?

Problem with assessment - students never really know how their grade is broken down?
Relies on exploring technique and process, most film art, fine art and sound students work with concept and the amount of work (and time) required to create the artefact may not be proportional across disciplines.

To assess fairly: skim reading no longer applies, would increase marking time (so lecturers would need more time), are lecturers really equipped to mark this work - do they *know* the media techniques?

If we can use audio work as a viable outcome then we can learn and figure out how to assess it.