Please note, I have specified which tracks do and do not contain vocals.
Azerbaijian Bagpipes (Ugam) (instrumental)
Men’s House Song – Papua New Guinea (instrumental)
Navajo Night Chant – America (with vocals)
Panpipes and Drum Song – Peru (instrumental)
Sacrificial Dance (Igor Stravinsky) – Russia (instrumental)
Johnny B. Goode (Chuck Berry) – America (with vocals)
Jaat Kahan Ho (Surshri) – India (with vocals)
Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Hungary (with vocals)
Gavotte en Rondo (Bach) – Germany (instrumental)
Cranes in Their Nest (Shakuhachi) – Japan (instrumental)
Reducing the list of 27 tracks down to 10 was considerably challenging, as I had strenuous criteria that I was employing. In my selection, I wanted to showcase tracks that are exclusively instrumental and those that include vocals as well to highlight the variations in human creativity and self-expression. Additionally, I wanted my list to truly span across different continents, countries, cultures, genres, moods, tones and even types of “stories” that were told through music. Although most of these tracks do not exceed three minutes, ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better’ for a musical time capsule in my view. As articulated by Smith (1999), digital technology affords us the opportunity to access resources that we otherwise would not have had access to; listening to the tracks and even reading the comments on YouTube enabled me to not only have direct and convenient access to them, but also to explore other people’s perspectives that I would not have met or interacted with otherwise.
Mode-changing enables us as Designers of multimodal literacies to both inherit and create new meanings, thus empowering us to design social, workplace, public, and community futures (NLG, 1996). In essence, we are involved in developing new uses of old materials with various design modalities (NLG, 1996). For this task, I redesigned Task 1 into an exclusively Audio Design vs. its original inception as a blending of Linguistic and Visual Design. The task “What’s in Your Bag?” is by default linguistic and visual, employing written language to convey what is portrayed in a photo or even artistic rendition of the contents of one’s bag. To make this compelling to a listener, I took full advantage of the Audio Design elements at my disposal to create a “podcast” experience: equipped with intro and outro music, accompanying sound effects and high-quality voice recording and editing, I created an “episode” as if the segment is part of a broader podcast series. To engage the listener further, I avoided simply describing the items and their “literacies” and instead opted to set them up as a “game” for listeners to speculate about and guess at: this encourages more active listening and thoughtfulness when compared against the original design modalities of the task. As noted by Dobson and Willinsky (2009), digital literacy seems to be fostering a higher degree of participation in various activities due to the ease of writing, enhanced linking of ideas and texts, and the aspiration of providing universal access to knowledge. Engaging in this task compelled me to think more critically about how content can be presented through a myriad of modalities to garner an audience and facilitate meaningful participation.
I would make the case that audio-visual modes have become more prevalent, but not necessarily at the expense of written ones: rather, these modes are still very much dependent upon solid written foundations. For instance, when someone watches a YouTube video or listens to a podcast, the content creator still often needs some degree of scripting to ensure their materials ‘flows’ well, written content for transitions/chapters/segments, and even the inclusion of Closed Captioning (CC) for accessibility. Additionally, websites such as Tumblr and Pinterest tend to blend such Designs together – particularly Linguistic and Visual. I don’t believe the question should be “Which modes are dominating?”, but rather “Which modes are dominating which spaces and why? For whom is this content created?”
The Information Age has necessitated not only a general understanding of multiliteracies, but also working knowledge of how to produce them: this is especially true for educators, as they are increasingly challenged to create multimodal content to engage and instruct their learners. NLG (1996) asserts that meaning making requires inheriting and (re)creating multimodal relations within electronic multimedia. Millennials and Zoomers specifically have been acclimated to this reality through simply navigating the world as it currently exists – information permeates our daily lives through the devices and apps we use to the cultures and subcultures that influence (and are influenced by) them. To create relevancy, educators must recognize and integrate subjectivities (e.g., interests, purposes) with their respective languages and discourses to foster compelling learning experiences (NLG, 1996).
References
Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 286-312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
For context, I used my iPhone’s Notepad app to complete this week’s task.
Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
As the series I selected is quite complex and includes many critical and nuanced details, I found it challenging to synthesize all that complexity into simple emojis. I found that I relied almost exclusively on words and ideas, but I can concede that my interpretation of the narrative might differ significantly from someone else’s, thus choosing different emojis and perhaps even sequencing altogether. Bolter (2001) articulates that two readers of the same pictorial writing could use different words to describe what they see, as it is constructed culturally as being closer to the reader since spoken language is not used to mediate the meaning. Without the opportunity to communicate anything orthographically, it will be fascinating to see how my peers might interpret what I have developed here.
Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
Yes, I started with the title because it could be conveniently constructed using emojis. Even if someone has not watched the series (yet), they can glean a very general impression of what happens throughout the course of the story; the “spoilers” are not easily discernible, but to someone to has watched the series, they may be able to interpret my “retelling” of the narrative through emojis. Interestingly, Bolter (2001) describes pictorial writing as lacking narrative power since the picture elements can contain a myriad of verbal meanings that often mean too much as opposed to too little. In essence, if someone has not watched the series, it could almost represent a game of ‘Broken Telephone’ in which the reader has a drastically different interpretation of the narrative than what it actually is.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
No, I chose the work based on my passion for it and the inherent challenge of conveying major plot points without the convenience of orthographic communication. I tried to focus on the most important events and outcomes, paying special attention to the sequencing of events to cause less confusion to those who might recognize the series and have seen it. I found that it was quite enjoyable to “boil down” the essence of a story I love through a purely pictorial format as I am a highly visual person to begin with.
References
Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110
