Month: October 2025

This was a really fun task and sort of eerie too! I kept imagining aliens listening to these sounds at the same time as me. It was even more challenging trying to pick out 10 musical pieces that represent all of humanity on Earth. 

I picked the following pieces:

1. Senegal: percussion recorded by Charles Duvelle
2. United States: “Johnny B. Goode” written and performed by Chuck Berry
3. Japan: shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi
4. Austria: Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14 by Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor 
5. Peru: panpipes and drum collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima
6. Azerbaijan: Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes recorded by Radio Moscow
7. Germany: Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano 
8. Germany: Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor
9. India: raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar
10. Java: court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers” recorded by Robert Brown

I tried to include most geographical locations. However, I also chose some that I think would be useful in communicating with extra-terrestrial life if it exists out there, such as Bach, as mentioned by Tim Ferris in Twenty thousand hertz podcast. I chose some classical music by Mozart. Some sounds I included sounded soothing, welcoming, and yet mysterious such as the Peru and Azerbaijan Bagpipes. I included Beethoven because of the varying pitch and frequencies of music. As a South Asian myself, Jaat Kahan Ho felt like a natural choice and made me feel represented. 

References:

Music from Earth. (n.d.). NASA.

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

I turned my submission for Task 1 into an interactive game that you can access through this link:

https://arcade.makecode.com/S40247-06221-41179-50822

Initially, I was unsure how to redesign it in a way that was unique but still carried significance. I had many ideas, like designing an augmented or virtual reality scenario, or even making a twine game again. But in the end I went with Makecode Arcade as a tool to build my game. There were several reasons for this. I could design the items of my bag myself, adding a visual layer to the game, I could add fun sounds to each action or item, and most of all, I found it easy to use.

This task combined with the second reading of the week made me think deeply about the benefits of mode-bending. The many examples mentioned by The New London Group (1996) including the example of spoken language being a matter of not only audio but also linguistic design made me understand how multimodality works.

References:

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

This task seemed easy at first but turned out to be a challenge. I just chose the last movie that I saw. Initially I thought it would not be too hard since the premise of the movie was simple enough. I started off with the title but learned soon enough that it’s going to be hard with all movies. I began by focusing on all the words, then ended up going for the common nouns, then tried to use emojis for ideas. However, even with a plethora of emojis available to choose from, I was still struggling to come up with appropriate ones to describe the movie. For instance, I wanted to include a ‘road’ emoji but could not find it. It made me realize how we’ve gotten used to the availability of so many emojis that describe almost every experience we feel when not so long ago, we only had a handful of emojis available to choose from. And even though I do use emojis often to communicate and express how I feel, it can be hard to use them for things such as movie plots. When Bolter (2001) said, 

“Words no longer seem to carry conviction without the reappearance as a picture of the imagery that was latent in them”(p. 51).

It made me reflect on my own emoji use in my daily life and it was obvious that if I wanted to say something that I thought might offend someone, I would include a silly emoji to show it’s not that serious. I started conveying emotion through emojis or hiding what I actually meant to say.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Gamenight Murder.html

I have used twine once before to create a sort of choose your own adventure game. That was over a year ago so using twine again required a bit of practice once again. I went back to find my old project to see how I had incorporated images and linked different things to each other. I also had to do some additional research to find out how to center align images. But I used this task to explore my creativity. I always wanted to design an escape room / murder mystery type of scenario in a game so I tried achieving that with this twine task, however once I began doing it, it felt like I had bit off more than I can chew as the time for this task was limited and I had to do the readings for this week as well. 

However, I still enjoyed the process. My game is still a work in progress but as I have worked on it throughout the week, I have used my creativity muscle which I hadn’t in a very long time. And as I kept using it, more and more ideas opened up in my mind. And just like a tree spreading its roots or branches to make connections, that is exactly what it felt like designing and thinking whilst using twine. And when I read the required reading for this week, it stuck in my head that tree diagrams have been used for many, many years to do exactly what we are doing in twine (Bolter, 2001). Using twine to make so many connections and links felt like I was building a canopy of tree branches linking together to tell a story.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.