New Media and Literature

With my primary interest in literature, I always try to find connections between both literature and the concepts in our New Media course. Last weekend, I was flying back from a conference exhausted by all the papers read to me. I was thinking that I’d like a more interactive conference, one where presenters create literary criticism in a new, exciting, and engaging way. I know that some scholars have begun the task of creating presentations in multimedia form; I just wish more people would take advantage of the technology. Maybe that will be my task in the future.

Also, I was browsing the internet about new media and literature. I found one school where they offer students a Literature and New Media major. It sounds interesting.

Standardized v. Innovative

The following is extremely reductive. I present it as my intial attempt to unpack the binary that Mary discussed in class.

Standardized (what I consider based on current-traditional rhetoric):
• Academic discourse/ audience.
• Linear progression.
• Process oriented.
• Asks students to adopt an objective stance.
• Positions the writer as an autonomous agent. Writing, therefore, belongs to the student.
• Values empirical evidence. Quantifies arguments.
• Values a paper over the project.


Innovative (what I would say is based on postmodern/digital/electric rhetorics):
• Multi-directional discourses/ more rhetorical emphasis on audience. Hypertextual progressions.
• Post-process orientation.
• Values student awareness of their subjective positions.
• Positions the writer as a node in a network. I think this raises the question of who writing belongs to.
• Values alternative forms of evidence.
• Values the project as project.
• Qualifies arguments.

Some other new media poems

I've posted these before, but I thought we might (re)visit them in light of the new media poems discussed in the text and in class.

Sonja Peng's Superelectronic

Drew Cope's Drum Machine

Ben Pinckney's Sentosa Mikano

Digital Recording

Sorry, this is a long one, but I have been thinking about this stuff for weeks!

Most of you know that one of my projects for this class includes recording three songs and three sonnets for my wedding CD. I have finally (about 50 hours later) completed the project, and I wanted to share some interesting reflections.

Before this project, I had only recorded music on an analogue four track. While it did have some pitch control and tape loop features, they were bothersome to use. Even when used correctly, a trained ear could easily hear when a track had been spliced or manipulated.

Therefore, I, like most of the analogue musicians I knew, recorded entire "takes"--a track would be played through completely from beginning to end. I might split lead guitar work up between two tracks or have enough rests between measures to take the track in sections. The analogue technology only allowed for eight tracks (and that required me to mix down, or "bounce," a few tracks together since my machine was only a four track). Each track had to be planned and well-executed.

The worst part of the analogue recording process was taping what I refer to as a song's "shell"-- a complete play through of the rhythm from beginning to end. In time. Without a single mistake. For a difficult song, I might record four or five hours worth of music before I got my shell. This sucked.

When I first started using the Cool Edit program, I approached recording like I used to. It took me about three hours to get a shell for the song "Joy." I then spent around two hours mastering the shell (going through and making sure all the notes are the same volume and reducing any pops/crackles/hisses that came through on the tape). I recorded about three bass tracks and then started working on the lead. For the first time, I started playing with multi tracking my solos- if you listen closely to the song, you can hear the solo start talking back to itself across tracks. I also started editing out notes that I didn't like. No longer did I have to retake an entire solo, now I could easily mute out a ten second clip and replace it with a new take. While this might be relatively simplistic to some, to me it almost felt like cheating. Coming from the school of Hendrix, you can take it as many times as you want--but it should be a take. Music is created with an instrument, not with a computer, right? (Obviously, I am having a hard time accepting the computer as a instrument...)

(Un)fortunately, I lost the session blueprint for "Joy," so I didn't spend ten hours micro-obsessing over every single note. I really didn't start thinking about what the program could do until the second song, "Commitment." This song still had a "shell," but I started adding lots of background tracks to accompany the basic rhythm. I think the final count was around 20 tracks, some only 15 second long.

By the time I got to the third song, I dropped the "shell" idea. The song was longer than the other two and extremely difficult to play. It actually was a watershed moment when I realized "hey, I can record the song in pieces and then splice it all together." I really started pushing Cool Edit for all it was worth-digitally manipulating pitch, volume, eq levels, applying reverb, splicing notes, and generally obsessing about everything. In the end, this is my least favorite song--I just couldn't get it to "work" as well as the others. Part of that is due to the fact that after the first seven hours of recording, my computer crashed. No I had not saved. Yes, Cool Edit has an auto back-up. But then that crashed too. Music gone. Needless to say, I was not quite as enthusiastic the second time through...

For anyone that made it this far, there is one more interesting thing I would like to share: digital recording software cannot produce distortion. I can't even really record it well. I was talking with Mark Leahy about it (he's the wonderful/horrible person who supplied me with a copy of Cool Edit), and he explained that computers cannot record distortion because they don't know how to deal with broken sound. Makes sense, right? A tube amplifier creates distortion by erratically disrupting sound waves, a computer doesn't realize how to translate this breaking into 0s and 1s...

Sorry to steal so much space,
Santos

More about folksonomies

Here are a couple of more blog posts about some aspects of folksonomies:

Matt Locke

corante.com