Here is Jamie’s entry for Task 7: Mode Bending:

Jamie Ashton – Task 7: Mode Bending

And here is my entry:

Task 7: Mode-bending

Jamie and I both decided to go with a strictly audio reinterpretation of our Task 1: What’s in the Bag posts. Many others went with more multimodal reinterpretations, but Jamie and I both stuck to audio, which presented an interesting challenge. Some others also created audio, but incorporated much more speech into it, had written accompaniments, annotations, or video to go with it. What Jamie and I created was almost entirely non-verbal sound. Reading about Jamie’s experience reflected a lot of what I discovered while creating my task, namely that it is strangely difficult to create something that is descriptive without the use of what we normally consider ‘text’ technologies. Without written words, spoken words, or visual representations, it can be challenging to think of how to convey the meaning, purpose, or description of something. Non-verbal sound somehow seems less ‘textual’.

At the end of the task, we had both created something that I believe is ‘textual’, and conveys (in very different ways) the content of our bags and a window into something about each of us.

While we both took fairly similar tactics in utilizing the sounds that the objects in our bags can make, or make in use, we differed in the overall production of the sound. I created a very random and non-uniform series of sounds as I moved from one object in the bag to the next, never repeating an object. The end result was a sort of journey through the objects in the bag, with each sound being a singular representation of each object, with the whole of the recording being like someone was removing each object one at a time from the bag and examining it. Jamie, on the other hand, created something that can be described as musical. I thought this was a really fascinating way to do it, creating a soundscape of her bag! The change in the method of producing the sounds and the organization of them created a really interestingly different experience for the two recordings. Mine comes across as somewhat like a linear story, whereas Jamie created an aural experience. When I listen to the recordings, they come across to the listener very differently. Mine is telling you to focus on each object and visualize them and their meaning one at a time, whereas Jamie’s is asking you to experience the bag in its totality as an experience. It doesn’t ask you to think about each object as much as mine does, but it conveys more of an overall feeling, meaning, and experience of the bag.