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About elambiotte

Hello I'm currently a 2nd year student at the University of Pittsburgh and am using this site for the purpose of the Composing Digital Media course. I enjoy writing, drawing, photography, and music. I also like watching movies and hanging out with my friends whenever possible.

Reflection

My Class Experience

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect when I added this class to my schedule for the fall semester. Entering the room for the first time was a little intimidating due to the amount of seniors and older students in general taking the class also. It was a pleasant surprise seeing the variety of projects that we would become immersed in over the semester. Image editing, audio recording, website creation, and the collaborative unit provided a nice balance that kept the class interesting. read more

I chose to inspect Google Play Music's site for this activity. The sight is minimal in organization and background color. The theme for Google Play Music that distinguishes it from Google Play Movies/Books/etc. is the color orange. Important links, prices for music, and the logo are all orange while the rest of the background is white and grey. This kind of calls back to the reading we did earlier in class where a piece of advice was to use a grey color for the font instead of black to make it easier on the eyes to read. Album and single cover art are largely displayed on the page with the titles, artist, and price located directly below the art. The user can navigate to their library or the store on the left tab and, while in the store, can navigate to the top charts and new releases in the top tabs. There is also a genre filter located next to the top tabs. Account settings are located in the bottom left corner. The left tabs and account settings stay where they are if the user tries to scroll down the page to look at different songs. Bringing your cursor over to the album cover art causes it to darken in hue and bringing it over to the title or artist causes the text to underline indicating a hyperlink. read more

I read John Bresland's piece differently than he did aloud. His rendition reminded me of a noir protagonist going recalling the events of the day. The ominous music and effects supplemented the atmosphere and the aesthetically aged recording of his voice. Bresland makes the story seem like it was set at a time much earlier than what I interpreted as present day. I'm curious what a visual representation of this story would look like. read more

My immediate knowledge concerning copyright came from how licensing worked using Soundcloud and uploading your music. When publishing a track you're given the option of choosing an "All Rights Reserved" or "Creative Commons" license. When I had previously done a quick internet search to find the difference between to the two it seemed that in general, a Creative Commons license is more liberal with its sharing options and while you can enable certain permissions with an All Rights Reserved license you have to specifically choose under a category what a person can or can't do with your music. Besides music publishing, I have lots of experience with citing sources in MLA format. Following the readings I'm still not sure about the differences between specific licenses yet but I definitely have gotten a sense about the guidelines for using other people's property in your own work.

Stolley's manifesto was interesting to me as I had heard the term "lo-fi" used before but never in the sense that he described it. I found the flexibility paragraph to be the most interesting as Stolley states that while the production of lofi is "inherently limited." However, there is flexibility in terms of how it is used. The github tutorials paralleled many of the points made in the manifesto and I was able to see physical representations of the concepts of lofi in the manifesto. Github seems like an interesting tool and I'm excited to use it more in the coming future.

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