Sound Walk through Maspeth-Blog #2

Blog #2

For my sound walk, I decided to go around the small industrial town of Maspeth, located in Queens, because of the mechanized feel to the environment. The area is grim in sense of color as most buildings are charcoal gray warehouses. However, one walk around the area and I began to realize that the sounds of Maspeth reveal another side to this dystopian town. Maspeth began to show signs of life through my eardrums.

As I took my first few steps down the long roads, I heard the most ubiquitous of noises; that of forklifts constantly being in reverse and loading/unloading hauls. The prevalent beeping of forklifts plays the drums of the streets. Above this backdrop of boisterous beeping, you can hear orders being shouted which involved curse words from multiple languages. At times, you can sense that you’re in a melting pot of cultures simply based off the profanity. The profanity almost serves as vocals to the drum-like peeping of forklifts. In addition, there was the shutting of large metallic garage doors once workers were finished shipping out orders in their massive Mack trucks. Although it may have seemed like a general clusterfuck of noises, these numerous sounds define the blue-collar urbane haven of Maspeth.

Momi Assignment - Eduardo Barrera

I had never been to the museum of the moving image, but have heard of it. I was excited about finally visiting. The station that I found most intriguing was the television control room demo they had of a "live" baseball game. It took us behind the scenes of a live tv production. It was a multitude of screens with different camera angles and shots. There were at least 10 different screens. The tour guide explained the process, where the director has the job of picking and choosing the shots to be shown live while also paying attention to the game and making sure everything runs smoothly. There are numbers assigned to the different screens/shots and the director, Bill Webb, is constantly calling out numbers to switch shots to. Those shots get broadcast and is what the audience sees. Another cool part of the museum was the voice over mini-studio. Here, two volunteers dubbed over Jack Black's lines in School of Rock. The tour guide mentioned that actors often have to do this for every line in the movie to make sure everything sounds correct. The actor first gets a practice run and then has to recite the lines in sync with the lip movements in the movie. I can imagine that the actor must get bored by doing this several times to get it right. We don't see this as it's post production material and we only see the end result. The museum was really interesting and entertaining. I will definitely be checking out future exhibitions.

Sound Walk - Eduardo Barrera

I decided to do my soundwalk project in Hunter's neighborhood. I walked for about 10-12 block down Lexington.

When I walked out of Hunter, the first thing I immediately heard was the generator of the food truck right outside Hunter. I usually pay it no mind, but now that I was focused on sounds around me, it was really loud. Walking down Lexington there was a lot of cigarette smoke, although it isn't sound I thought it is noteworthy. There was constant noise of the cars passing by, specially from the large trucks that made more noise. Initially when I went out, I expected to hear birds chirping but the first chirps I heard didn't come in until 5 minutes into my walk. I kept walking down Lexington and heard wood cracking and breaking. It was coming from a garbage truck that was collecting the wood for disposal. Right after, I heard and felt the train pass by underneath me. Walking towards 59th, the streets started getting louder with people's conversations. There were many conversations going on at once, making it a loud incomprehensible area of noise. When you really focus on the sounds, you get to hear more than you usually would. The footsteps of people becomes more clear, the conversations might be interesting and there is always something to get distracted by.

Blog #3(trip to MOMI)--Zehui Liu

To me, the trip to the Museum of Moving Image must be unforgettable and awesome! Since this is my first time visiting the museum, I could absorb numerous stuff that I haven’t experienced before and at the same time further my studies in media. Inside the museum I saw numerous photos of many famous actress and actors in the old times and see what are their major works. Followed by that I saw the “fake” legs made for the famous movie “Black Swan”, they made the legs look so real that I can even see some of the details, this is how I feel interested mainly about the “behind the scenes” of the film just so I could discover more surprises on how people use technologies or other kinds of way to make something which approaches to the real stuff. There were also many “vintage” stuffs like cameras and costumes so that we could have general understanding about the history of the films, cameras, tv and so on. The zoetrope and thaumatrope marked the starting point of the moving image, the other interesting was the room that shows total different moving image before and after. When the lights were on we didn’t see anything special just objects were spinning but when the lights are turned off all the sudden we see several faucets are dripping. Moving on, the educator showed us the scene in “Titanic” with editing the background music or rip off the sound effects to see the difference. The other interesting thing which stood to me is when we are watching the backstage of tv station when they are doing the live. That gives me the benefit of seeing the entire process of live report and its really surprising to see the director is the only one who is speaking all the time and telling other people to switch to different cameras so that the audience can see different angles of the shots. After all, I think this experience definitely helps me in understanding more about the media production and many stuff are behind the scenes that you don’t know about.

SOUND WALK!!! Melissa Romagnuolo

I live on a quiet Island so I actually had to listen closely to everything. On my way to school I hear nothing but the sound of my feet scrapping the concrete beneath me. The wind blew and created a rustling sound within the trees. It was very early so it was like I was the only un-natural sound on my dead end street. As I get close to a cross street I began to hear the faint hum of cars. I finally reach the busy street, all I hear is screeching, and honking. I walk up to the bus stop and random peoples conversation at the other bus stop fills my ears. I can't make out what they are really saying, so it sounds like a whisper or a mumble. A woman walks toward me from behind and her jacket rustles and sounds like a bag of potatoes chips crumpling. The further she walks away from me the more faint the sound is. I'm suddenly distracted by the bus screeching toward me as it slows down and stops abruptly, seizing the screeching sound. The bus sounds like it relieves a sigh and lets out air from its lungs. The doors screeches open and seizes just as the bus itself did. I grab the rail and my rings clink against the metal. I rummage through my pocket of random receipts and it sounds like the ladies jacket from earlier. I find my Metro card and place it in the slot. The machine beeps at me in acceptance and I find a seat on the lonely silent bus.

Momi Field trip refection blog

This is my first time visiting Museum of Moving Image. It was such a great trip, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. The exhibition is called Behind the scene, which is the pre-production, posted production process of a film. First we were introducing to the autograph of movie stars in the history, then the mask made actually for the actor, the original screenplay, the production design, the costume, the silent film- Great Train Robbery, the early video game, old projector, flipbook, sound editing, film cameras, lighting, live in sports game, and the dummy used to replace actors in different ways. I personally like the sound editing section, it is very interesting when everything breaks down, and how it adds together make the scene convincble. It's really hard to imagine the work that foley artist puts in, the example we saw is the scene in Taitanic, which the big chimney falling sound was actually an elephant sound. I finally understand how important audio is to the video, and all the diegetic, non diegetic sound which can helps build up the scene more visually. The other interesting thing is the live for sports game, it is amazing that there are lots of camera that's recording and the director has to keep communicate with each of them, then it become the actual game we see on the TV. Behind the scene is a lot of works, and also very important, because it determines how the works is going to turn out. I learned a lot from this field trip. I might visit it another time when I am free!

Blog #3: MOMI reaction_Jessica Granato

The trip to MOMI was great! It was not my first time there, but they did have a few new exhibits. I volunteered myself in the demonstration for the voice-over recording. Our ground chose to dub over Jack Black’s character in School of Rock, during the part when we recites his version of the pledge to the students. We learned that voice-overs are used a lot, to perfect the sound or re-do when errors occur, in post-production. This department of post-production is very crucial, and it is very important to get volume and accuracy of matching both the actor’s mouth and the recorded voice to be spot on. When participating in this voice-over, I learned the matching aspect is actually pretty hard to perfect, and requires a lot of takes. In addition to this, I really enjoyed checking out the original TV’s. I’ve always thought the history of the television was pretty interesting, and seeing these original devices in person was particularly exciting. It was really interesting to learn the history of the design of the TV. Makers such as GM, who at the time was more known for their washer and dryers, ovens, and other household appliances, wanted to get into the booming TV business quickly, so they used the bodies of these appliances and turned them into televisions. This style may have also been chosen to attract housewives, to make the transition of having a television in the home a familiar one. Although our group never checked out the Jim Campbell exhibit, I ventured off on my own, and was really impressed with his use of light as art and to describe emotion.