cc licensed flickr photo shared by leo_irakliotis
When Jim Groom hatched the Digital Story open course I bet he never envisioned the wonderfully weird, wild, and open free form radio happening these past few days at radio ds106. It would look like utter chaos to anyone looking in, which is good, cause it is.
It was Grant Potter’s genius that launched the madness, string together dropbox, playlist generator, streaming Icecast server, and likely other bits of duct tape. Pretty much anyone can upload any kind of mp3 audio file, and many are stringing together mini sets of songs.
People are mixing music, mashups, clips from shows, movies, ed tech talks.
I missed the first bits while on the road last week, just saw the tweets flying by, but it does not take much to get sucked into the vortex
cc licensed flickr photo shared by robpatrick
I had this half baked idea to mashup a version of Beck’s “Where its At” with some web 2.0-ish lyrics, instead of “Got two turntables and microphone” it was “Got a wordpress blog and a twitter account” I spent about 15 sloppy minutes doing a lazy version today:
The base was a midi version of the song- I had to run it through QuickTime Pro to export as an AIF and then import into Audacity. For the words, I did the lazy thing, and used the OS X built in text to speech to do this- its super simple, I put the text file to be read on my desktop, and use this command in Terminal:
|
1 |
say -v Alex -f ~/Desktop/beck.txt -o ~/Desktop/whereat.aif |
which uses the Alex voice to speak the words in the “beck.txt” file and save it as an audi file “whereat.aif” (I learned this from http://www.leopardtricks.com/leopard/alex-speech-tricks. In Audacity, I slid things around, and slowed down the tempo of the Alex file (I added a few extra bits from a second file that just had “DS 106” in it a few times.
Oh, it might have worked better if I cleaned typos, and added punctuation for Alex. Oh well,
My new updated lyrics are:
There’s a destination a little up the road
From the habitations and sites we know
A place we saw the lights turn low
Plugin pizazz and new dea flowPulling out feeds and cool blog themes
Wordpress blogs and twitter account
youTube flickr just clap your hands and just clap your handsWhere it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter account
Where it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter account
Where it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter account
Where it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter accountRetweet me home in my follower bones!
That was a good blog postGet yourself up off passive side, its a read write web
With your widget sidebar and your new found celeb
Creative commons, hyponotizers
Tweet out CNN like ambulance drivers
Shine your rep with your google juice
Hirsutes with your viral videos
Passing the news from coast to coast
Let the man matt mullenweg rock the mostWhere it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter account
Where it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter accountWhat about those who swing both ways: Blogger, facebook
Let’s make it out, Baby.
WordPress blogs and a twitter account
Wordpress blogs and a twitter account
Wordpress blogs and a twitter account
Wordpress blogs and a twitter account
Wordpress blogs and a twitter account
Wordpress blogs and a twitter accountWhere it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter account
Where it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter accountOh, dear me. Old web pages are a two-horse town
That’s beautiful, Bava
Get my twitter appThere’s a destination a little up the road
From the habitations and web sites we know
A place we saw the lights turn low
Plugin pizazz and the new idea flowPulling out feeds and cool blog themes
Wordpress blogs and twitter account
youTube and flickr and just clap your hands and just clap your handsWhere it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter account
Where it’s at
I got WordPress blogs and a twitter accountI got page rank on my mind
iPhone android babyOh Bava, it’s been good.
Let’s make it out, baby.
Good good good.Thanks Bava, good.
So what does this mean? Not a whole lot. But Jim and I believe these little bits of fiddling about creating media, trying new things, expressing, and then putting out there feed the creative spirit.
It was a blast today to join my colleague Bryan Alexander and be live streamed on ds106 with Jim and class at University of Mary Washington (this was some strung together bits of Skype, Nicecast, Wiretap, etc). It was completely unscripted, including, unfortunately, the part where Bryan disappeared when his laptop crashed and burned.
We did get to riff on Web 2.0 Storytelling (and I am ready to drop the ‘2.0’), alternate reality games, digital identity, the daily shoot, sharing and not sharing photos, whether animated gifs are stories, and more. I am counting on the UMW team posting a recording soon. We talked about the ways people might extend their story craft in the radio space (developing characters, building stories from audio, ???).
I’d like to see more blog posts where people talk about the design or idea behind the sets they post- this is the liner notes, the DVD extras that I crave to learn from. It’s the meta, baby.
But mainly, it is clear from the river of output at http://ds106.us that there is a dedicated stream of creation, from students in the course and people wandering in from outside. The burst of activity in radio ds106 seems to be drawing in even more people, and perhaps people who might not have jumped in on the other parts.
Where it’s at…
Hey Alan,
Great post, I was struck by one line in particular, “I believe these little bits of fiddling about creating media, trying new things, expressing, and then putting out there feed the creative spirit.”
I think that line epitomizes the spirit of #ds106, Web 2.whatever you ant to call it and the reason why we are all here. It’s the feeling that you are not creating art in vacuum all by yourself.
There are no final products, by fiddling and sharing we are throwing ideas against a wall hoping some stick and inspire others. Sure it is not professional and the quality of work may be amateurish, but it is raw and honest, having said that I am awed by the quality of work from participants.
You also mentioned that you would, “like to see more blog posts where people talk about the design or idea behind the sets they post- this is the liner notes, the DVD extras that I crave to learn from. It’s the meta, baby.”
I have been a bit obsessed with Sound Cloud the last couple of days, but people could also their shows there and others could comment on the time line about the music.
Take a look: http://soundcloud.com/davidkernohan/followers-of-the-apocalypse-radio-ds106
Great song by the way!