Audio Post-Production: Getting Rid of those Hums

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Hi everyone,

Today’s post will mostly be interesting for those of you who have an interest in audio post-production especially when it comes to dealing with the kinds of unwanted issues that ‘pop up’ during the recording process (pun intended, more on this later).

The projects I am currently working on is about creating and curating a number of video interviews to promote hybrid pedagogy (some also call it blended learning) and provide advice for faculty and students who want to try out hybrid forms of teaching and learning.

While the visual material has already been cut, there are still a couple of issues as far as the audio is concerned. As our interview videos will consist of both voice and background, we need to find a proper balance between the two. That means that some level adjustment is in order. Besides that, we will have to deal with some unwanted noise that found its way into the recording, the humming of the air conditioning for example. So, what I am going to do now is run you through the way I am dealing with these kinds of problems.

Before we begin, here is a quick and dirty run-down of the steps involved in processing audio for the video: cleaning and consolidating tracks, level adjustments, filtering out unwanted background noises, compressing, and limiting. All of those steps I applied to the vocal performances.

On a side note, the software I am using for this project is Pro Tools. However, since all of these tasks are basic elements of mixing, they can also be accomplished with other available software that’s currently on the market such as Logic Pro, Cubase, Ableton Live, or GarageBand.

Before we begin, if you interested in learning more about audio recording, mixing, and post-production then check out the tutorial videos on Lynda.com. Georgia State University has access to the entire Lynda catalog of videos. You can use your campusID and password to sign in. Once you have access, I suggest you check out the following videos: “Audio Mixing Bootcamp,” “Foundations of Audio: EQ and Filters,” and “Foundations of Audio: Compression and Dynamic Processing.”

 

1. Cleaning up and Volume Adjustments

Below you see my point of departure. I started out with a total of four tracks. From top to bottom: the video track, a reference track that contains speech as well as music, then a track that contains all the interview bits, and finally the background music track.

 

Editing_1

 

What I already know is that since we’re dealing with four speakers (three women and one man), we’re going to run into issues if we process the voice track as a whole. Each speaker will have a different timbre, so if the processing works for one speaker, it will surely not work for the other three. Therefore, I cut the voice track and created new audio tracks, so that I can process each speaker individually. For the background music we’re relying on a pre-recorded music track with a Creative Commons license, which means it is freely available, and also already processed. So, no need to add further processing to it. However, what you surely want to do when you have music as part of a video interview is to have the automatically decrease in volume when there is speech, and then increase again during pauses or sections where there is no speech. What we want to accomplish is a consolidated listening experience from start to finish. This automatic volume adjustment is called “ducking”. If you look at the image below, you will see the music track in purple at the bottom. Notice, how the waveform is larger when nobody speaks (i.e. relative to the four tracks above you’re seeing above the purple track), and much smaller overall when there is speech.

 

Editing_2

 

Now that this is done, we can start dealing with the biggest issue: noise. I’m sure most of you have experienced the kind of background noise I’m talking about. Take for example a video recorded on a smart phone and instantly uploaded to YouTube. In the background you might hear a hum, or hiss, that’s quite noticeable throughout the entire video, so much so that it can distract you from focusing on the content. One of the most common background noises is the so-called 60 Hz cycles hum, caused by electro-magnetic vibrations. Let’s hear an example of it in isolation.

There are two ways to deal with these kind of unwanted noise problems. The first is to use an equalizer, which is nothing more than a frequency-based volume control at the end of the day. Today’s digital equalizers commonly include a visual graph of the entire range of frequencies we can process. That makes it easy to locate the 60 Hz frequency by turning the frequency control knob, and then notching it out with the gain knob. Keep in mind, however, that you want to use a very narrow bandwidth so that the equalizer only applies processing to the frequency in question. The so-called Q-knob allows you to narrow the bandwidth. The other way is to use more specialized tools for that purpose. The benefit of using a specialized tool such as the NF 575 noise shaper which you’re seeing in the screenshot below, is that these types of plugins automatically take into account the fact that background noises such as buzz and hum not only occur at the core frequency, but they also translate up the frequency range in regular intervals, which are called harmonics. If you use a standard equalizer, you would have to find the upper harmonics, that contribute to the noise, manually. Specialized tools will do that work for you. Notice the visual graph in the plugin window below, and you will notice that it is not just the core frequency that is notched (in yellow), but also the corresponding harmonics (in green, blue, and purple). In addition, when processing voice material you want to make sure to filter out all the audio information that lives below the frequency range of the human voice, which is usually between 75 hz to 12,000 KHz. Microphones have a much wider frequency range than what the human voice uses, which means that a microphone will pick up more information than is needed. For Kim’s vocal track, that meant cutting away all the audio information below 100 Hz (colored in gray) since her voice doesn’t use that frequency range at all. Be careful, though, when you use filters. You don’t want to set the filter too high. 75-100 Hz is usually good for male voices, 100-125 Hz for female voices.

 

Denoiser

 

As you can see (you might have to zoom in a bit), the first frequency (no# 1) is set to 120Hz. With a simple press of a button, the other four frequency bands automatically settle on the remaining harmonic frequencies above the core frequency. Let’s hear the difference:

With noise:

 

Without noise:

You can do the same thing with a regular equalizer. You just need to make sure that you find those upper harmonics.

To conclude the first step, I did some minor level adjustments so that all the speakers are roughly equal volume.

 

2. Using the Equalizer

Once I was happy with the results, I moved on to applying some equalization of the signals. I knew that I would be using some compression (basically automatic gain adjustment) later on to smooth out the overall volume of the tracks, and to avoid audio spikes from happening. Therefore, I applied some equalization before the compression because I didn’t want the compressor to react to frequency content that I didn’t consider relevant.

 

EQ

 

I understand that this whole window must seem confusing, but what I want you to look at is in the lower right corner. There you see a visual representation of the equalizer. In almost every recording, there are parts of the audio signal that become problematic when multiple signals are played back together. Then, certain frequencies start to compete with one another. Perfect example is a vocal and a guitar. Both instruments use a similar frequency range. Within that frequency range, however, there are parts which really help the guitar to be heard while others really help the vocal when played together. Therefore, it’s a common practice to cut out some frequencies from the guitar to make room for the vocal, and vice versa.

But moving back to the work at hand. I carved out some unnecessary frequencies to make the vocal sit better with the music in the background.

 

3. Compression

There are entire books that discuss compression, so I won’t be really going into details. However, I’d like to give you at least a general idea about compression and what it does: let’s say you’re driving in a car with your mother. Your favorite song is playing on the radio, but there are parts in the song that your mother finds way too loud. So, anytime she thinks the music crosses a volume level she isn’t comfortable with she automatically reaches for the volume knob, turns it down and brings it back up in accordance with her overall volume preference. An audio compressor works quite similarly. It’s automatic volume control. A compressor usually consists of four parameters: attack, release, threshold, and ratio. Going back to the car analogy: attack is the amount of time it takes your mother to reach for the volume knob on the radio, release is the amount of time it takes her to bring the volume back up once each loud part of the song is over, threshold is the volume level above which your mother freaks out because it’s too loud, and ratio translates into the amount of volume that she attenuates. In essence, a compressor is a tool that you can use to deal with sudden peaks in the audio signal, thereby smoothing the perceived performance.

Coming back to the video, take a look at the following image, and notice the wave form in the yellow-colored block:

 

Editing_2

 

As you can see, there are a couple of spikes in the signal. Using a compressor can help taming those audio signal peaks in order to create a more even performance. Below is an image of a compressor, the CLA-2A, which I used to level out the vocal performances.

 

Levelling

 

4. Taking care of Sibilance

Oftentimes, especially with vocal performances, we also encounter unwanted high frequencies that occur when words are spoken that contain S’s, F’s, P’s, and T’s. The most common issue is with sibilant S’s. To deal with those unwanted kinds of sibilant hissing noises, I use a specialized compressor, called a “de-esser.” This particular compressor can be set only to those sibilant frequencies without affecting the rest of the audio signal. In the screenshot below, you see the de-esser on the right sight, providing a visual graph that shows the frequency which is being attenuated:

 

Deessing

 

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the top left of the plugin contains a visual representation of the frequency spectrum. Below there are three controls. I’m using the “Freq” button to set the desired frequency where the sibilant noises occur, in this case 5812 Hz. Then I lower the threshold on the right until the S’s are being attenuated. Watch out, though. If you set the threshold too low, then too much of the sibilance is lost, and the speaker will appear to have a lisp.

Let’s hear what the de-esser does to the signal. Listen closely to ‘ch’ in the word “teaching” and the ‘s’ in “course”:

Without De-essing:

With De-essing:

The key is not to get rid of the sibilance entirely. Then it wouldn’t sound natural anymore. But you do want to tame those moments of sibilance a bit.

 

5. Limiting

As a last step, I used some limiting to bring the entire audio signal to a more reasonable listening level overall. Limiters are special kinds of compressors that usually come into play at the end of a chain of processing to prevent audio signals from clipping and distorting. Here is a great explanation taken from Mediacollege.com of what a limiter does and how it differs from a regular compressor:

 

Limiter

 

And that pretty much concludes what I’ve done to the audio signals. We will be showcasing the videos at our end of the semester showcase.

 

I wish you all a great Spring Break!

 

Best,

Thomas

 

Pedagogical Uses of Cell Phone Apps

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For most of us, using apps has become second nature. Not only do those little programs allow us rapid access to information, they also enable us to connect, share, and collaborate. There are already various apps available for educational purposes; however, they still only find their way into the classroom inertly.

So, this blog post is designed as a means to share various offerings and to put them into, what I believe, are important pedagogical categories:
1. Increasing time-management skills
Even a simple app such as the one controlling the camera can help speed up the process of note-taking. For instance, students don’t have to write down the information on the board stoically anymore if they can simply take a quick snapshot with their cameras. As an instructor, it does take some time getting used to seeing students take photos of the board. But in an era in which efficient time management skills are crucial ingredients for success, it doesn’t hurt showing students that technology can, indeed, make our lives easier. Of course, other apps can also help students here such as the note-taking app Evernote to more dedicated education apps such as GeoGebra for studying math. What speaks in the apps’ favor is that students work within multimodal, interactive environments that are usually updated on a regular. All in all, there are various apps out there that instructors and students can and, I believe, should check out.
Yet, in my opinion the allure of cell phone apps for educational purposes becomes especially pronounced once we start treating apps as potential avenues for students to become (co-) producers of learning.
2. Developing active students
Beyond their affordance to offer almost instantaneous access to a wealth of information, apps can also empower students to become active contributors of learning content. Students can use their cell phones for multimodal, interactive assignments, for instance. The integrated camera and microphone allows them to conduct interviews wherever they go. Dedicated study group apps such as MyPocketProf allow students to teach one another when they study for major exams without having to be in the same place at the same time. Finally, programs such as the free Spreaker app can be used to create and share podcasts with ease. All of these apps allow students to become more exposed to technology, and instructors can help students to hone those skills for their later professional careers.
Many instructors, however, shy away from allowing students to use those tools because they already feel overwhelmed not only because of the sheer number of apps that are currently available, but also because instructors don’t want to allow their students to use tools that they don’t even know how to operate themselves. There is certainly sense in that. I would never recommend to a colleague to use a tool in the classroom because it’s supposed to be the latest and most trendy thing right now. So, never jump on the bandwagon. Still, I encourage instructors to take some time and familiarize themselves with these kinds of applications.
Our team at the Student Innovation Fellowship program is also here to advice instructors who are thinking about using these new tools in the classroom. So, feel free to message me if you have any questions. Also, if you know of other apps that would work well in an educational context, please leave a comment below.

Innovative ways for instructors to encourage students’ interest in politics

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In today’s post, I want to share with you a smart idea that was presented by Dr. Steven Stuglin from Georgia Highlands College at this year’s conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. His talk was on the potential uses of science fiction and fantasy stories to facilitate undergraduate students’  understanding of topics discussed in the Departments of Communications, Political Science, and History.

The major premise of his presentation was that today’s students have become more and more disaffected with politics due to a number of reasons such as political trust, political interest, and political understanding. Consequently, students might find it more difficult to comprehend political concepts and political history when these topics are discussed in classroom environments. However, most students today have either seen or read a number of science fiction and fantasy pieces such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, etc. Thus, Stuglin argues that science fiction and fantasy—as often underutilized tools—may provide suitable lenses through which to understand socio-political realities. In other words, while he emphasizes that science fiction and fantasy stories as well as the characters that live in these worlds need to be regarded as extreme examples, Stuglin promotes the use of plot and character to problematize political theories, systems, and communication practices as a means to bridge the gap between student’s disinterest in politics and the political system(s) they live in.

One example that I found most striking in his presentation was the way instructors might discuss pretty complex texts such as Plato’s The Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, or John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty through the prism of science fiction and fantasy. In this case, one could relate Plato’s ideal leader—powerful and strict but generally interested in the public good—to the mighty lion king Arslan in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones might work well as an example of Machiavelli’s claims regarding the attributes necessary for effective leadership: cold, calculating, evidencing fear as a form of control. Finally, Professor Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series seems to illustrate the limits of control, as discussed in Mill’s On Liberty.

As a way to engage students, Stuglin suggests activities where students categorize leader characters in science fiction and fantasy text according to discussed texts. As a next step, students would then do the sam with real contemporary politicians.

Overall, I really enjoyed the presentation, and I will certainly try his approach in future classes.

 

Cheers,

Thomas

Time For Some Updates

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I have been a member of the SIF family now for a little more than two months, so I guess it’s about time to go through all of my projects for this semester and give you updates on each.

1) Hybrid Pedagogy Promotional Videos

This project has been a straightforward one from the beginning. The general idea is to record a series of interviews with faculty members who are experienced with a teaching that blends online and offline (i.e. in-class) activities–in other words, hybrid teaching. For this, we have come up with a set of focused interview questions, and over the course of the first 6 weeks we have conducted various interviews with faculty members. We have been able to compile a great amount of material to work with. We are currently in the post-production phase of this project, or should I say the first stage of this project since we believe that promoting hybrid teaching should also be considered from the students’ perspectives. To that end, we are planning to conduct more interviews with students in the course of the next semester in order to balance the information we have so far received from faculty. I am currently in the process of learning Adobe Premiere Pro so that I am also able to help out with the post-production process.

2) Outreach and Documenting

Similar to the project above, this one is also clearly situated in the world of promotion. The basic premise of this project is to promote places at GSU where students have the opportunity to access, use, or check out technology devices. Find out more by reading this great post from my colleague, Amber. Granted, the GSU website already provides a great amount of information regarding those places, but we came to the realization that they didn’t really showcased these spaces “in action”. So, during our early group meetings we noted all of the technology sites that are currently available at GSU, and quickly honed in on the Digital Aquarium, the Aderhold Learning Lab, and the Exchange. For each space, we had planned to shoot short, 1-minute videos that highlighted less what these spaces offer, but more how students might be able to use available devices. Unfortunately, as this idea began to take shape, we learned that each of these spaces is going do undergo major design changes, so any video we recorded would have had a pretty short life span because they would have all featured each space in its current state. That caused us to go back to the drawing board. Now, we will be focusing solely on the new CURVE space in the library in order to give GSU faculty incentives to assign activities in their classes that would make their students come to CURVE.

3) 3D World and Gaming Environment

This project is quite unique. The basic idea is to virtually re-create a city-block in Atlanta, the one where Classroom South is located to be precise, and display how this block might have looked like in the 1930s. Check out this great post by my colleague, Robert, to learn more about the virtual environment we are creating. In addition, we are planning to populate that space with objects and characters that students can interact with and learn more about the history of Atlanta. Furthermore, we also hope to have writing students create narratives and stories that further help to shape this virtual environment. Throughout the first couple of weeks into this project, I have been mostly involved with trying to consult archival sources such as photographs and newspaper articles to help our production team design the space through a gaming engine called “Unity”. We have now, however, reached out to other teams at Emory, which have also been working on a similar mapping project in order to combine our resources and see how we can help one another. My responsibility now is to facilitate that discussion and further help adding content to the virtual environment.

4) Deliberation Mapping Tool

For this project, we are currently in the conceptual design stage. To give you a general idea of what this project is about, I want to refer to this great post by my SIF colleague Nathan: “Deliberation Mapping – Shaping Online Discussion“. Over the course of the last two weeks, we had some great meeting sessions, to which Siva and Ram have wrote engaging blog posts: “Integration and Finalization!!!” and “Where is the big picture?” The situation we are presently dealing with is how the different ways a user participates in a deliberation are represented visually. Below are some impressions from today’s meeting:

IMG_2094

Justin giving directions.

 

IMG_2102

Figuring out participation parameters.

At this stage, our main goal is two-fold: we need to find ways of facilitating ease of use both for students and their instructors  as well as to come up with ideas on how to avoid asynchronous deliberations of becoming messy from a visual perspective.

5) Data Visualization Workshop for Research Purposes:

This is a project that emerged in the course of October. At the beginning of the semester I had been tasked with a project to create a software tool that would help a researcher visualize vocal parameters such as volume, pitch, and timber. Fortunately, I have been able to help guide the researcher to various audio production programs and tools that already offer those kinds of visualizations. So, once that project was completed, I created the “data visualization workshop” project together with Justin and Joe. The basic premise is to offer innovative ways for students and researchers to evaluate research results that they retrieve from academic databases. Oftentimes, when we access the GSU library to search for sources, we type in keywords and receive long lists of results. What if we had a way to transport those results into a visual environment and easily identify how the search relates to, let’s say, publication venues, its use in research studies over time, the kinds of disciplines that do the most research on the search term, especially when it’s a topic that is oftentimes evaluated in interdisciplinary ways. Translating my findings into a workshop was the logical conclusion. However, in order to determine the kinds of programs that are necessary to visualize database research results, I first need to identify how to best export the search results from the database. In the course of the next week, I am planning to have meetings with database experts at the GSU library regarding this issue. Once I know what’s possible, I can move further with this project.

 

I feel very fortunate to be part of the SIF team. I have already learned a lot and I am eager to see how all of these projects will turn out. That’s all for now.

Cheers,

Thomas

Following up with Nicole’s recent post

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I’m writing this blog post as a follow up to Nicole’s “Innovation and Education” post that she published on October 13. What I particularly liked about her approach to tackling the concept of innovation is that it’s not certainly necessary to “reinvent the wheel” but to take into account as many perspectives as possible when attempting to create something new.

Following this line of thinking, being innovative can be seen as doing something else with knowledge and processes already available to us. In turn, it stresses the idea that innovation always comes from “somewhere”. In few cases, innovative ideas emerge our of nothing. What I have found quite helpful in applying this logic of “somewhere” is to subscribe to as many online outlets that relate to your interests. In my case this meant subscribing to the various Youtube channels of the conference series known as TED. Below is a list of channel links:

TED, TED-Ed, TEDMed, TEDFellowsTalks, TEDxYouth, TEDxTalks.

 

For those of you who are not yet familiar with the organization, TED is a conference platform that works to share ideas worth spreading. This year marks its 20th anniversary with conference presentations that deal with a broad spectrum of topics and issues coming from the fields of technology, entertainment, art, education, business, and medicine. The organization curates most of those presentations on its various YouTube channel, thereby creating an impressive archive of information and knowledge. Tapping into this knowledge can really help generate ideas that we can consider innovative.

For example, this past summer I attended a TED conference in Berlin, Germany, where one of the presenters talked about a software application that helped visualize how TEDFellows were collaborating all over the world. The premise of the presentation was merely to show what the organization was doing and how the TEDFellows were fitting into the mix. Each fellow was represented as a colored dot and the collaboration between fellows was shown through curved colored lines that connected the dots. The size of each dot would, then, represent the extent to which each fellow would collaborate with others, i.e. the bigger the size the of dot, the more the fellow has been engaged in collaborative projects. Furthermore, a user could also select a fellow by clicking on the dot which would grey out most of the dots and lines and only leave those lines and dots colored that connected to the one selected.

I was blown away when I saw that. It made so much more sense than, let’s say, going through a traditional table layout and comparing mere numbers for each fellow with one another. With that software, the process of comparing relationships became a much more intuitive process. When I got back home, I went back to working on my research for my dissertation, and I started thinking: “There has to be a better of making sense of all the sources, concepts, and ideas that authors in my field of research are bringing to the table. And that’s when I thought back to that moment at TED, and I realized that visualizing research strands could be a very helpful way for me–and other researchers for that matter–to make sense of the huge amount of sources I am dealing with.

And so now I’m working towards finding easy accessible ways to get available software programs to do that very thing. Hopefully, this will all make its way into a workshop that I am going to give at GSU.

I will keep updating my progress regarding this project on the blog, but what the whole thing boils down to–echoing Nicole’s recent post–is that you don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” to do something innovative. Instead, what I suggest you do is to take advantage of what the Internet offers to all of us: access to a huge archive of knowledge. The TED channels I’ve linked above could serve as a great starting point. And if you find that TED actually interests you beyond advancing your knowledge, then I suggest you get in touch with TEDx organizers in your city. The are already a number of TEDx groups in the city of Atlanta, such as TEDxAtlanta and TEDxPeachtree, and also some affiliated with universities such as TEDxGeorgiaTech and TEDxEmory. Maybe it’s about time to thing about TEDxGeorgiaState?

 

Cheers,

Thomas

 

And I thought we’d moved on…?

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I’m confused right now, so be prepared that this post is going to be half-informative and half-venting. I’ve recently come across a Youtube-sensation, for lack of a better word, and I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m talking about Salman Khan whose free learning website, Khanacademy.org, hosts more than 3000 lesson videos and his Youtube channel attracts millions of students and teachers alike. Apparently, it all started in 2004 when he just wanted to help his cousin with some private tutoring lessons in math. Fast forward ten years later, and Salman Khan is known across the world as the “global teacher”. Pretty impressive, yes, but what I find even more confusing is that he manages to attract such widespread attention with a teacher-centered, lecture style approach to teaching that many of us teaching have found to be an antiquated and, flat out obsolete method. Why? Well, the most common argument is that frontal teaching limits students in developing their own critical thinking skills. Rather than having students engage with content actively, they passively consume the lecture.

So, I’m wondering why Khan’s approach has been working so well. Usually his videos last between 8-15 minutes, are produced in a relatively simple fashion, i.e. he uses a screen capturing software where he solves math problems for instance, and his voice narrates the whole process. So, you only hear him but you never see him. Instead, you see a black canvas on which he scribbles the equations and explains the whole process. Aside from math, physics, chemistry, and economics, he also teaches history and biology (the last two not being his particular area of expertise), even admitting that he gets most of his information for those topics from Wikipedia entries.

I find that whole thing fascinating and scary at the same time. I wholeheartedly reject the teacher-centered approach to pedagogy, always trying to empower my students so that they can develop their critical thinking skills. And then I see Khan and his success with an antiquated teaching method, and it seems to work. Khan has been receiving wide-spread media attention now for years, and many students have said that before they take high school level or college-level tests, they would watch a couple of Khan’s videos to prepare rather than going over their class-notes (check this link).

What do you think / how do you feel about this? I’m really interested to read your comments, and have a lively discussion about the potential merits of such an approach to teaching.

Cheers,

Thomas

A Sifendipity that turned into an activity

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This week I have been quite busy conducting interviews for my hybrid pedagogy promotion project, and one aspect that came up frequently during those interviews was my interviewee’s particular reservation against using the microblogging platform Twitter for pedagogical purposes. Most interviewees said they don’t (like to) use Twitter because it would sent their teaching into a tailspin, thereby making it more difficult to administer the students’ learning experience.

I can certainly understand the attitude. Once we go hybrid with our pedagogy, we introduce additional spaces into the learning experience and it can become quite overwhelming not only to administer the content that students produce on Twitter, but also to use that content for assessment, not to mention that in every class there will be students who don’t use social media tools at all (at least that has been my experience so far). So, from that angle, I can surely understand how Twitter can be quite intimidating at first.

However, a couple of days ago I found an email in my inbox from a research-sharing website which contained a paper on the rhetoric of hashtags by Daer, Hoffman, and Goodman, titled “Rhetorical functions of hashtag forms across social media applications,” and here I can certainly see the merit of using Twitter in the classroom for critical thinking exercises as well as for practicing analytical skills. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, hashtags are used to connect Twitter messages to larger conversations. Hashtags are words or unspaced phrases that follow the number sign (#), and they can be placed anywhere in a tweet. But beyond its ability to construct a conversation space, a hashtag can also tell users in each instance a thing or two about the contextual configuration of that space. In other words, by looking at the hashtag we can draw inferences as to whether the conversation space was created to inform, identify, entertain, critique, rally, or maybe motivate. Check out a couple of hashtags below and think about the underlying purpose of the conversation space in each case:

#geeiamsubtle

#firstworldproblems

#goodtoknow

#standyourground

#digped


For a composition class or a critical thinking class,  in which questions of audience awareness and purpose are important topics of discussion, I can certainly see the benefit of using Twitter. Surely, Twitter can also teach us a thing or two about the advantages of brevity in writing, but this only goes so far. I find that Twitter would work better for analysis exercises. I imagine that an activity could be that students choose a hashtag, identify its purpose, and then analyze a set of tweets in relation to the extent to which they fulfill the purpose of the conversation space. In order to capture the tweets and turn the activity in for assessment, students could use the free webtool Storify, which allows users to collect and curate material from the internet.

I will certainly try this activity out in the future. If you think the activity is interesting, and you get a chance to do it, then please comment and let me know how it went.

 

Cheers,

Thomas

It’s all about the content! … or is it?

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Over the last week I’ve been really busy with one of my projects in particular, which is to produce a series of short videos, featuring both faculty members as well as students, that are designed to shed light on so-called hybrid approaches to teaching and learning. What does that mean? In essence, a hybrid approach to teaching and learning combines on-ground, in-class activities with online activities and discussions. Especially in the last couple of years, more and more attention has been given to this particular educational design, presumably because the explosive developments in digital information technologies and social media applications have had the effect that most of us spend more time online now than in the past. Naturally, academia doesn’t want and also shouldn’t fall behind those developments. That being said, however, there are a number of challenges that need to be considered when blending offline with online education, as put forth by Jesse Stommel, Founder and Director of Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology:

“[The] challenge is not to merely replace (or offer substitutes for) face-to-face instruction, but to find new and innovative ways to engage students in the practice of learning. Hybrid pedagogy does not just describe an easy mixing of on-ground and online learning, but is about bringing the sorts of learning that happen in a physical place and the sorts of learning that happen in a virtual place into a more engaged and dynamic conversation.” (“Hybridity pt. 2: What is Hybrid Pedagogy?”)

So, our videos are designed to ease the process for both faculty and students to approach hybrid educational settings. And rather than putting forth a series of “how-to”-videos, we’ve decided to tackle this pedagogical concept by presenting a series of short anecdotes from experienced faculty members as well as students. I believe that a set of stories will make the whole experience much more relatable.

So much for content and context. With that being said, however, our content can only be as good as the quality of the production, particularly in terms of video and audio quality; taking those aspects into account is important because we typically find well-produced content a lot more credible. In turn, we experience bad video quality, bad audio quality, or a mix of both as distractions from the content. Even studies have shown that a video with even slightly distorted audio impedes the learning process because we need to use parts of our brain activity just to listen to the content through the distortion, similar to having to read through lots of typos in an academic paper or smudged printing of the pages.

So, below I’m going to share a few links that are not only helping me with my current project, but which will also help you when you consider creating videos for educational purposes:

MOOCing It: 10 Tips for Creating Compelling Video Content (great general tips)

What Happens to a YouTube Video After 1,000 Uploads? (insightful take on what happens when you upload a video on a platform such as YouTube)

Video Making 101 – Good Sound Quality Is Essential (& how to do it) (pretty self-explanatory. Check it out!)

How to (and Why) Produce High Quality Audio for E-Learning (great tips to get you started)

Videography Tips (great general set of guidelines, including the “Seven Deadly Camcorder Sins”)

We’ve now scheduled the first interviews with faculty members willing to share their experiences. I’m very excited about the outcome, not only with regards to their stories but also when it comes to the quality of our production.

As mentioned in my first post, I also want to end my post with something valuable to share. This time I would like you to check out Lynda.com. It’s a great, subscription-based online resource with lots of tutorial videos that I’m sure you will find valuable. The platform not only features video tutorials for specialized software such as video editing programs, which I will have to wrap my head around, but you will also find a lot of great tutorials that deal with office applications such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or Outlook. And the great thing for us at GSU is that you can access the whole catalog for free. Just follow this link.

Cheers,
Thomas

Let Me Visualize Your Words, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are

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Consider the following everyday life situation: you’ve bought a defective item, and now you are discussing return policies with a customer service agent over the phone…then maybe you are not discussing return policies at all but you want to place an order over the phone. In any event, I dare you to ask yourself if you’ve ever wondered what the agent on the line might actually look like? I am sure that we’ve all done that at one point or the other, and I am also speculating that 9 out of 10 times our intuition would fail us and the agent on the other line doesn’t look anything like the image we crafted of him or her in our minds. Now, why might this be worth noting? The inference that we can draw is that there are certain cues embedded in the human voice which, when all we have is sound, motivate us to craft an idea of the speaker in our heads. Moreover, not only do we imagine physical attributes, we also equip the voice with certain characteristics that the speaker presumably has. Succinctly put, when we only have the sound of a voice available, we are often tempted to fill in the blanks of the speaker’s personality. And this leads us to the well-grounded assumption that the human voice is shaped by the relative relationship of various parameters such as

pitch, tone, timbre, rhythm, inflection, and emphasis among others,

which—during the act of listening—leave us with impressions about the speaker that go beyond content and context as well as the mere level of sound. The only problem is: the human voice is a fleeting thing, which makes it virtually impossible to measure and analyze the interplay between all of those parameters in real-time. Not so with pre-recorded speech, of course, which provides researchers with a potent avenue to capture and visualize the dynamic interplay of parameters that shape the human voice, and the way it is perceived.

To be honest, however, up until a week ago, that topic had never really crossed my mind. But then I had my first couple of SIF meetings, and I am now working on a project designed to find (better), more innovative ways of visualizing prerecorded voices along a set of specific parameters, enabling researchers to export parameter-related data for quantitative as well as qualitative analysis. How fascinating is that?!

I have put “better” in parentheses here for a reason because there are already quite a number of programs available that do just that.

Rosebud

What you see above is a screenshot I have taken with the free software, Praat (click the link to download). Whit this little tool, one can not only record mono and stereo sounds, one can also load pre-recorded sounds in order to visualize a couple of the kinds of parameters that I’ve listed above. The sound I have chosen for this example is a word, and it’s probably one of the most enigmatic utterances in cinematic history: “Rosebud” from the movie Citizen Kane  (1941). The main character, Charles Foster Kane, utters this word with his last breath, and throughout the movie, audiences ponder not only the meaning of but also Kane’s relationship to the word. I don’t want to give away any spoilers because it’s such a great movie, but what I can reveal is that Kane is fond of what “Rosebud” refers to. Now, moving back to the image, what if there was a way to visualize vocal parameters in such a way as to draw relatively accurate inferences about the emotional quality of different types of utterances.

What we can visualize with Praat, first and foremost, is a waveform in the upper half, and the amplitudes here tell us something about the volume and the emphasis of the utterance. Where things become more interesting, however, is when we look at the lower half of the image. Here, we have access to visualization of certain sound-related parameters such as pitch (marked in blue) and intensity (marked in yellow). Applications like Praat are commonly used in the field of speech therapy.

Current research on sound visualization is trying to capture vocal expression on a quantitative as well as qualitative basis. Here is just one interesting paper on the topic in which the authors are “particularly interested in the paralingual (pich, rate, volume, quality, etc.), phonetic (sound content), and prosodic (rhythm, emphasis, and intonation) qualities of voice” (157): “Sonic Shapes: Visualizing Vocal Expression.”

And this is one of the projects that I’m going to work on this semester. Again, up until a week ago, those questions really hadn’t crossed my mind. But this is what it means to be a SIF fellow at Georgia State, I guess. Not only do you get to start working with a group of very smart people, you are also being confronted with new things, new questions, and new ways of seeing. And if all goes well, you eventually start looking for even newer and more exciting things yourself that you’re eager to share with others.

Speaking of sharing, I want to make it a habit of always ending a post with something worth checking out. So, if you haven’t seen Citizen Kane, yet, then by all means, do so!