Week 1: Networked Learning

So, here’s one of the videos we watched (there’s adorable baby footage). In it, a professor from KU talks about how we “get by” our classes and watch our education pass us by because we’re just trying to “get through” our requirements and commitments during college. He also points out the design flaws in the higher education system, and I think it’s a very illuminating critique on how we view higher education. The most notable was the question of whether or not having a bunch of students in stadium-style seating facing a teacher who basically talks at them for one to three hours–or more–is the most effective way to keep them engaged or enthusiastic (or even interested at the most basic level) in what you or I as the teacher have to say. I go into classrooms now and specifically pay attention to the ways in which seating is arranged, where the main focal points are, what the students look like (are they facing forward? Are they even awake? Engaged? Texting?), what the teacher looks like (do they have a flat affect and speak in a monotone? Are they gesticulating wildly with enthusiasm? Are they moving around or remaining stationary? Are they using a powerpoint presentation? Are they using multiple mediums? Are they writing on the board? Are they inviting students to come up to the front? Are they moving around the room? Can they move around the room or does the design of the space restrict their movements?). I also pay close attention to the design of the space and think about how that affects learning and teaching outcomes. Having just finished a human-centered design course, I have become a believer in the power of design thinking to improve and democratize higher education, and am fully cognizant of the fact that the way in which a learning space is designed and built directly influences the type of learning (or lack thereof) that happens there. -Jasmine

NIME 2018

This year’s NIME conference was a smashing success!

The genuises leading our design team, Meaghan Dee and Patrick Finley, created award-winning designs for the proceedings, we had a promotional short to hype everyone up…

There were multiple keynotes…

… and a great deal of enthusiasm from attendees, who documented the proceedings on social media.

Oh, and Gregory Taylor from Cycling ’74 (the good people who make Max/MSP and who are now a part of Ableton), even wrote a glowing post about the conference on the site!!!

I am so proud of all of us (the performers, the keynotes, my fellow grad students and ICAT staff who were the beating heart of the conference) for pulling it off! It was a week of insane schedules and no sleep and way too much coffee, but we did it and there were many attendees who were happy to tell us that this was the smoothest NIME they’d ever been to! Off to the next adventure!

Baby Steps (and a leap of joy!)

Jasmine

More (pre-NIME) Updates

The NIME conference will soon be upon us, and after a crazy semester, I am all prepped for the roller-coaster of the international conference coming into town. The good news is that a lot of artistic and professional progress has been made: I took a sculpture class in which I learned MIG welding, I presented the beginnings of my thesis research at ICAT Day (mine was on page 14 of the program, The Sonification of Emergence), and I was a TA this semester. Below are the fruits of that labor.

 

Baby steps (pretty big ones this time),

Jasmine

More Sound Stuff

lot has happened between my last entry and this one…

So, over the winter break (which lasts from roughly a week before Christmas to mid-January at my school), I took a course in Immersive Environments. I was part of a project  team that created an environment that was a composite of particles and crystals, whose locations were mapped onto the exhibition space, a 134.6 channel high-density loudspeaker array called The Cube–this one, to be precise–with two semicircular screens about 17″ tall which are collectively referred to as The Cyclorama (the guy in this video was one my my teachers–he’s The Sound Guru and knows the space inside and out). So, we projected the video content onto the Cyclorama while the sounds played throughout the speakers in the Cube, and we used a program called Max to control everything: from the imagery (some of which was modeled in Maya and adapted for stereoscopic 3D and rendered in After Effects) to the sounds, which were spatialized using a patch (essentially a graphical/node-based program that executes the task you’ve assigned it) in Max that allowed us to place them exactly where we wanted, namely where the crystals were, to create the impression that the crystals were resonating bodies that emanated their own sounds while the particle field in which they floated provided a visual and sonic ambient background. My primary job was creating a soundscape that matched up with the ethereal, quasi-magical atmosphere of the person in charge of visual content, and it worked rather well, since the people to whom we presented out project seemed to be impressed, and they liked my sounds (which always makes me squeal with sound-nerd glee).

At the moment, I am continuing my work on various other sound projects, and not doing quite as much with modeling and animation. Most of my coursework and research is semester is also centered on sound, and since the NIME conference is coming to our campus this summer, I will be immersing myself in bleeding-edge sonic research for the foreseeable future, which is a very exciting prospect.

 

Still taking those baby steps,

Jasmine

Baby Steps – After Effects

Morning, all!

Last month, I had a teaching assignment during which I showed my fellow students how to incorporate sound into After Effects. I had to learn first before I could teach them, but in teaching them, I reinforced what I’d already learned and gained new knowledge…

 

 

That’s a purely visual composition, but I’m also getting back into sound design a teensy bit with After Effects…

(For those familiar with After Effects, I’ve become very good friends with the particle simulator effects and TrapCode)

 

Baby steps,

Jasmine

3D Motion Graphics (Converted)

About that whole sound thing…

Morning, all!

It seems I have much more going on in the realm of visual art and animation at the moment than in music and sound art, but that should change fairly soon. I have a few projects in mind that involved extensive use of sound as a medium and am very excited to see where they go. However, given the volume of visual arts projects I am currently undertaking, it appears that those projects will not appear on this site for a little while. For the moment, I’ll leave a snapshot of what’s to come:

NIME_design.png

 

Baby steps,

Jasmine