Makey Makey Eggs And Breaky

I’d like to start by saying how pleased I am to be done with coding. Hopefully all of my dailies and coding projects were submitted correctly. Todd and I have been working together on our Makey Makey project, which has been less frustrating than coding, but still challenging. I had a minor insight today that all work with software has its difficulties and obstacles, whether it’s coding, audio mixing, or video editing. As Diana mentioned in her post, things don’t always going according to plan when it comes to working with tech. Todd and I are using compression as our theoretical guiding point for our Makey Makey project, and all of the software we have used in the past two days has had its own set of problems. Yesterday, we met with Todd’s friend Rudy, who programs the music at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Rudy knows music compression inside and out, and showed us how to use a software called Digital Performer which shows the back-range, mid-range, and fore-range of an audio signal on three graphs and gives various options for messing with (breaking) an audio file’s compression as the audio file is playing! Todd and I were thrilled with this software. We thought we’d be able to show how an audio file gets ‘broken’ via compression in addition to presenting the file’s discernible aural degradation.

Our enthusiasm quickly dissipated when Rudy had us download the newest version of Digital Performer, which does has compression features, but not the specific compression feature that Rudy has on his older version of the software. It was definitely a moment of four-letter words for Todd and I. Today, we decided to expand our software horizons and try Audacity for compression purposes. We downloaded the free version on both of our laptops, which did not come with the compression plug-in. Another four-letter word moment ensued, and Todd, to his credit, decided to soldier on and find some way to pay for the Audacity compressor plug-in so we’d have a better compressor than the one in the current version of Digital Performer. Eventually, we got the compressor for Audacity and were able to compare the graphs of one uncompressed audio file and another one that had been compressed. We still have some work to do tomorrow before our presentation, but fortunately we have a working and presentable compressor on software that we like and works for us. As I mentioned, all software presents obstacles between it’s utilized by humans who are imperfect, and in the future I’d like to make more effort to acknowledge and accept that.