DMAC: tools, processes, expectations

[tishaturk]

I'm currently in Columbus, Ohio for DMAC: Ohio State University's Digital Media and Composition Institute. I'm very glad to be here; I'm finding the instructors helpful, my fellow attendees delightful, and the readings very thought-provoking. But one of our first hands-on projects frustrated me immensely.

Here's what happened: We were assigned a few small projects centering on recording and editing a literacy narrative to submit to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. (I'll be writing more about the DALN; I would love to see fannish folks contributing narratives about our particular print and media and multimodal literacies, not least because I would love to curate a collection of those narratives. But that's a story for another post!)

We recorded our narratives with some nifty little cameras that can be converted to audio-only; the sound quality wasn't great, but in fairness my partner and I were recording outside, so the wind noise we got was our fault entirely. I mean, I missed using my own equipment, but I could deal with that.

Then we started editing the audio we'd recorded, first to tidy up our narratives and then to use snippets of them to create a PSA for the DALN. The computer lab we're using is Mac-only; instruction focused on using GarageBand, though Audacity was also an option.

Now, I've done a fair amount of audio editing (songs for vids, commentaries on vids, etc.). I like editing audio. I used to edit directly in Premiere, but since 2005 or so I've been using Adobe Audition, which I really like; it helps that I was already familiar with the Adobe interface from years of using Premiere and fooling around in Photoshop.

I was tremendously frustrated, to put it mildly, by both GarageBand and Audacity. I found the interface of GarageBand totally unintuitive in pretty much every possible way, and the help files were stunningly uninformative. It didn't help that the instructor framed editing in terms of splitting clips and deleting bits; I do some splitting in Audition, but mostly I slide clip boundaries around. GarageBand will let you do that, but only if you put your cursor in a very particular place on the clip edge, which, seriously, WTF. I switched to Audacity, which made more sense for me anyway since it's open source (which I appreciate!) and there's a PC version. But Audacity wouldn't let me move clip boundaries either, as far as I could tell, and once again the help files (and multiple Google searches) yielded no actual help. And don't even get me started on the limitations of their keyframing options for volume. Both programs appear unable to do things that I think of as simple, basic, foundational.

I fought my way through the process, but I'm decidedly unhappy with the results in terms of both sound quality and editing finesse. Rather than simply grumbling (although I confess I've done some grumbling), I've been trying to reflect on what happened and what it meant.

Thus far, I've come to three conclusions.

1. My work processes and even thought processes have been shaped by the software I use to a much greater extent than I'd previously realized. I find it much easier to learn a program for an entirely new task than to learn a new program for doing something I'm already accustomed to doing in a different program. It's not just that it's difficult to learn a given interface or to switch interfaces—I mean, it can be, but the problem is not usually the new interface itself so much as that the familiar interfaces have inculcated in me very particular and potentially inflexible ways of planning and executing the tasks for which they're intended.


2. I don't like being put in a position where I can't be good at something, and I especially don't like being put in a position where I can't be good at something that I am in fact already good at. It was not just frustrating but upsetting to me to produce something that sounded as bad as my literacy narrative did. I had real difficulty explaining to one of the instructors why I wanted to re-record and re-edit my narrative before I uploaded it to the archive (something I won't be able to do until I get home). She kept saying "Oh, but it's fine! It doesn't have to be polished!" I suspect she thought I was unhappy about the unrehearsed nature of the assignment, which doesn't bother me at all; I speak in public all the time and have made peace with the fact that I say "um" more often than I should and that I am seldom as articulate as I would like to be. I mean, there's a reason I'm a fan of written texts, which can be revised, but honestly, that's not what bothered me about the literacy narrative; I just hated how bad it sounded.
   
   The upshot for me is that, as I move into assigning multimodal composition in my classes, I need to think carefully about how I frame both informal exercises and assignments, how much time I allow for their completion, and what kinds of tools and resources I make available to students. I don't want to put my students in a position where they can't do a good job, either because I've overwhelmed them with tools they don't know how to handle or because I've failed to provide tools that allow them to use their full skill set.


3. I find it hard to be casual about multimedia. The literacy narrative assignment no doubt had several goals and purposes, which appeared to include practice being casual, experimenting, working under constraints. But multimodal composition is something I take seriously, something I've worked hard to learn, and something that in many ways is still difficult for me. I'm used to constructing complex multimedia projects—vids, in my case—through multiple drafts, so it's deeply disconcerting to be put back in a position where the first draft is effectively the final draft because of time. I'm not saying I could never be casual about multimodal composition, but I'd prefer to be the one who gets to decide when I say "eh, whatever" and when I take it seriously.

Since that early assignment we've had several more assignments, more lab time, more software instruction, and more (though not nearly enough!) discussion of our readings (the curious among you can check out the schedule). I'm hoping to write more about DMAC, but this post has already been delayed long enough by that whole DMCA thing, so I'm going to finish it and go out for Italian food with some of my compatriots and hope my brain is in better shape tomorrow.

Comments

[cathexys]

Fascinating response from you--I am always intrigued at the relationships between products and interfaces, but you're totally right that it affects how we THINK and WORK as well...

Question, though. I use audacity a lot and pretty much daily at the moment, but I have no idea what you mean by clip boundaries? I mean, to me it's intuitive bc it works like text. I can cut and copy and paste and manipulate locally and globally and then overlay different things...my biggest issue is actually how it dies on me too often :) Anyway, clip boundaries?

[tishaturk]

The clip boundaries are the edges of individual clips, the beginning and ending points. What I usually do in Audition is make rough cuts where I need to get rid of a chunk of audio, and then once I've nudged the remaining clips together I can slide the beginning and end points in and out to make fine micro-second adjustments. GarageBand can do this, though clunkily; Audacity seems unable to do it at all. In fact, Audacity doesn't even show cuts by default; I had to turn on that feature in the Preferences menu, where it's buried in a totally unintuitive submenu.

So I guess if you think of it in terms of analogy to text... It's like if you were working on an article and you cut a paragraph because you didn't think you needed it and then you realized you'd inadvertently cut the last word of the previous paragraph. Instead of having to retype the word, you'd just grab the edge of the end of the paragraph and tug it over a little to the right and the word you'd cut would reappear.

I'm trying to think about these issues conceptually rather than in terms of the software, but honestly, I am still horrified by the software. For me, an audio editing program in which I can't adjust clip boundaries (or in which that capability is presented so counterintuitively that I can't find it in the GUI, the menus, or the help files) is a program that does not work.

[cathexys]

Well, it does not work for you. It works just fine for me, which might be because I use it for different purposes (i.e., unlike editing a vidding soundtrack, I don't need exact temporal lines--it just needs to be internally coherent), but I can't wonder to get back to your original topic, if it isn't that the tools we've learned may affect the way we approach things.

Now some of it may simply be our own mental processes, i.e., I love organizing and subcategories, so I don't think i'd ever be convinced that the all in one place comment structure of old skool blogs is better than LJ/DW. But I know I used to hate gmail's all in one demand to SEARCH rather than having all my neat subfolders. It was messy and I had no oversight. Until i realized that my entire approach wasn't jibing with the way gmail users were supposed to think. I still don't feel native there, but I've certainly had enough mails sit in one subfolder on in thunderbird when I'm looking for them in another that i can see the advantages.

Which is not to say that Audacity doesn't have this shortcoming. Just that the way i needed to edit and the way I learned it with audacity never requires me to do what you're describing (though I now remember doing exactly that the one time I tried to vid and was editing my audio soundtrack in the movie making software...)

[tishaturk]

Well, it does not work for you. It works just fine for me...

Indeed. Hence the emphasis on "For me" in my previous comment and the entirety of point #1 in the original post.

Your comment also makes me think that the problem isn't just that I imprinted so strongly on Premiere (and by extension Audition, which has a very similar interface) but that the kind of tasks I associate with audio editing generally require precision. I'm not hacking together a podcast or whatever it is that non-vidders do with audio editing software; I'm trying to snip out a repetition of a chorus or cut out half a guitar solo and make it sound so seamless that the listener will never know. So even when I'm working on other kinds of tasks, the notion that one wouldn't at least try to make the final product sound seamless is anathema... to me. ;)

I love organizing and subcategories too; I don't know what I'd do without my folders and subfolders in Gmail. Bummer that the system doesn't work for you! I actually like the combination of folders and searching; I don't always remember to tag messages, especially ones I'm sending, so if they're not already part of a tagged conversation they don't necessarily end up in folders.