For this task, we needed to curate a list of 10 songs from the 27 musical pieces which exist in the Golden Record (NASA, n.d.)

My method for curating the final list focused on Rumsey’s question of what we can “afford to lose” (2017) which was the central thesis of her talk at Brown University. In a mere 10 songs, there is no true way to ensure that we can embody the sheer diversity of culture on Earth. Therefore, I looked at the sounds which each piece on the Golden Record (NASA, n.d.) contained; although I do play many instruments, I am in no way able to completely identify each individual sound placed within this playlist. In lieu of that, I used the brief synopsis provided by Taylor (2019) for each song and my own ear to try and curate a list of songs containing the largest variety of discreet rhythm, pitch, tonal quality, and style, as opposed to looking at culture. Below is a table of my notes, as well as the final 10 songs chosen.

My final 10:

1. Wedding Song – Peru
2. Bach – WTK 2, no 1, Glenn Gould
3. Mozart – Queen of the night – Eda Moser
4. Tchakrulo – Choir – Georgia
5. Melancholy Blues – L Armstrong & His Hot Seven
6. Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry
7. Jaat Kahan Ho – India – Surshri
8. Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Bulgaria
9. Kinds of Flowers – Javanese
10. Beethoven 5th, part 1, Otto Klemper

References

Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?” [Video]. YouTube.

Music from Earth. (n.d.). NASA.

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record. [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound.

Below is a Genial.ly of my assignment, based on my initial What’s in my Bag task linked here.

If you are unfamiliar with using Genial.ly, simply tap on the icon on the upper right corner of the interactive image to showcase which parts of the screen are interactive. Please keep your audio on.

For this task, we needed to tell the story of a piece of fiction through only emojis. Below is a screenshot of my narrative:

Reflection

In order to do this task, I relied wholly on the ideas of the plot. If I were to rely on indicating individual words or syllables, the narrative would take many pages to convey as it is an extremely dense plot. It is a story about movement; everything in the plot is defined by movement and traversing different landscapes. Hence, the majority of the emojis utilised rely upon indicating the movement of groups. Individual words were occasionally emphasised when signifying specific objects related to the plot, but it was always in service to the movement of the scenes.

I did start with the title for this piece, as it is the most easily identifiable. Starting with the title somewhere at the beginning is also common practice within prescriptive writing rules in order to situate the reader in the context of the narrative, be it through written word or through images. It provides foreshadowing for the key events to come, and indicates what the focus shall be. In this case, there are rings, kings, and alliances or friendships which dominate the entirety of the narrative. 

Choosing this work was natural in two ways; it is the most recent piece of media which I have consumed,  and it is the only recent work that is unrelated to what I have already discussed in other tasks for this course. I wanted to reflect upon something new, even though the narrative and flow are as familiar to me as the back of my hand, having consumed this same piece of work many times before throughout my life. 

NOTE: This post may be edited as I go through my colleagues’ posted tasks and guess what they’ve narrated through emojis!

Task 5_ Twine Task.html

While I have used Twine very briefly in ETEC 544, I have never really had the opportunity to make something properly using it. So, my strategy was much less a concrete ‘strategy’ and more of an exploration. When I thought of adding new links or functions, I looked up exactly how to perform that explicit manoeuvre. The commands were fairly straightforward for me, and as I have a decent amount of experience with basic HTML language, adding links or other features were not too troublesome. 

The writing of the text itself was the more nuanced portion of the task. This game is, just as mentioned at the beginning, a playful little stream-of-consciousness narrative. I merely picked a theme (feeling listless when there is much to do) and tried to build passages based on how my brain perceives information. The tangents, shifts in tone, and circling thoughts are fairly common for me, as my thoughts are constantly running a mile a minute. However, translating this into text which is not only engaging to an external audience but also utilised the functions of Twine adequately was definitely a challenge which took some time. 

I truly enjoyed this task. As a lifelong fan of video games, including visual novels (the most text-heavy style of game available) the process of making an interactive adventure is always engaging to me. I would like to create my own VNs in the future, as writing novels is a hobby of mine already. Yet, I always felt unsure of where to start with tackling the interactivity, so this task was an approachable opener to developing this new skillset. 

For this task, I chose the first option: manually writing a diary entry for Wednesday, September 27th, 2023. It was a stream-of-consciousness reflection on my mood and life at the moment.

In my daily life, I type far more than I manually write; I am an extremely fast typer, and thus my typing is much more suited to keep up with my thoughts in comparison to my physical writing. However, I didn’t find this task particularly cumbersome or difficult. Since I was a child, I have always loved writing in journals. This carried well into my undergraduate degree, where I used to make elaborate bullet journals. Writing by hand is a fairly straightforward exercise. Unfortunately, when I am writing a longer text such as in this exercise, my actual legibility is terrible, which is not ideal. 

As this diary entry is not a text intended to be written following the prescription rules of language in academia, I did not do much editing in post-production. Due to my choice of pen and my decision to double-space, I would have been easily able to edit more had I needed to. However, I did make a few edits while I was writing; this was either in the form of simply writing the correct word over top of the mistake, or crossing out the mistake and writing in the next available space. If I had been using a pencil or a digital word processor, I would have erased the mistake immediately, but as this was using ink, crossing out the mistakes was the most efficient method for me rather than utilising correction fluid. 

There are quite a few differences between writing by hand and using mechanized forms of writing, but I think the main difference is reproducibility. The invention of the printing press allowed for a drastic shift in the ability to disseminate information through written form. The time investment of having to write something neatly and without errors so others can read it is tremendous. That is not to say that mechanized forms are entirely not time-consuming – for mechanized forms of text-making, having to assemble each page and stamp individually to make the prints certainly still takes much time and effort – but the amount of copies created after that time investment vastly outcompetes handwritten text, which increases accessibility of knowledge overall.