I initially struggled with this redesign of the first week’s task because of how much freedom I was granted (how ironic). I knew I wanted audio to be incorporated somehow, as I was drawn to the idea of playing with sounds like a foley artist. However, this task still went through many iterations. Did I want to retain a visual component and make a video like the style of a YouTube vlogger? Did I want to create a Jeopardy-style PowerPoint where people would identify sounds from a list and earn points like a game show? Did I even want to reveal what each sound was or did I want to leave it all up to interpretation? Ultimately, I deliberately limited myself in choosing a few aspects from the original task to be redesigned so that information would be absorbed solely through the ears instead of the eyes. As Cope & Kalantzis observe in their article, “Multiliteracies: New Literacies, New Learning”, the meaning of one mode can never be directly or completely translated to another mode. While I found those words to never be truer, I was able to add a new perspective that could not have been conveyed meaningfully otherwise if I hadn’t replaced the visual with the aural, such as playing a song on the piano that I previously had in my binder or explaining the connection I had with the sound of my eraser.
The sections about sensory and semiotic transmediation in Peña’s article, “A Framework of Transmediation”, helped me land on an audio recording and how to shift the previously presented information into the new mode. The formal written language of my first blog post transformed into informal, unscripted oral language. The visual representation of the photo became audio representation where I was able to let the sounds of each object do the describing instead of my voice pointing out every detail or color, as that had already done in the first task. I was still able to retain some old ideas, such as narration in the style of a “Day in the Life” YouTube video and the use of no audio to give any listeners a chance to guess what the sounds were like before they were revealed. A challenge I found was that in eliminating the visual aspect entirely, relying on sound alone made it difficult to identify many objects in my bag without an aural description. While some sounds were obvious like the laptop, others were too quiet, blended with each other, or did not sound like the object at all. It was enlightening to embrace the benefits and circumvent the challenges of the redesigning process.
