shuang's itp jorney
welcome to my chelsea hotel
chelsea is a name given by naive shuang
hope you enjoy your stay
class six & seven
oct 28th
I am imagining an interactive narration with the midi controls. With the amount of time I had on this project, I was only able to create a seconds-long small demo. In the demo, the operator will have control over when a news broadcast came in place in an interstellar trip.
My vision for the project is that operator will have their control panel and are able to explore the non-linear narration by pressing different buttons. The story itself could just be really complecated. Right now, this is nowhere near completion.

class five
oct 14th
sound clip - creating a sound clip entirely composed
I kinda experimented more with Ableton....
The first intro clip is created mostly using my mouse clicking the midis. Just from creating this very clip in Ableton, I started realizing how complex a "regular" song is. There are dozens of layers of sounds mixed together and any imbalance need to be articulated for the creator to make adjustment accordingly. At this point, I think the intro piece is rather too simple to be a fully independent sound piece.
Ableton's interface is becoming more and more intuitive with practice. I am thinking about getting it on black Friday...
The second clip is based on the soundtrack for the Chinese News Broadcast at 7 PM every day. Most of my friends who knew about the sound and listened to my creation could not recognize it. I also showed the two clips to Yuhao, my musician friend. He suggested that I could experiment with the drum set more. He also thinks the news broadcast one is not recognizable but does have a similar vibe. He envision this clip being used on a space ship for interstellar travel news broadcast: "Ding dong di dong.. You are 4 lightyears away from the next stop."
class five
oct 7th
environmental sound - creating a space using sound as the media
class four
sep 30nd
My first attempt in Ableton.
I have always considered myself as more of a visual person. As a result, working with audio is a rather challenging process to me. Acquiring a novel skill or a novel way of thinking has always been appealing to me though. As one can probably see from the result compared to my last week's work, it is testing for me to get used to working with audio and the software. I had about 7 field recordings on my phone and ended up using four of them. I tried to be consistent and used the same device - my phone - for all the recordings, but they still contain a large range of different textures which was not helping when I tried to compress them since the recording quality varies depending heavily on the environment. I do feel like having a better planning process would help me create better audios.
response to playlist:
Brian Hodgson's Quest - Fast - Alternative Version.
I could not write this response with this song playing in the background. The jumping in the half scales and the synthesized effect portrays an absurd and nervous tone. The unexpected switching of the tone and repetition is also achieving a similar effect. The dripping sound effect, on the other hand, brings some whimsy to the story. I also looked into the original version of Quest to make some comparison. The nervousness toned down a lot in comparison, since the tempo slowed down a lot. The suspension, however, was retained. I could totally see them to be used as the background music for a pixel style role play dungeon game.
Who doesn't love pink floyd?
Money - Pink Floyd
I am not sure if the irony is intentional. I bet they are earning big bucks as they are singing about how bad money is. Who could blame them tho? Everything about it is so perfect: the swing, the lyrics, the sampling at the beginning and the end, the saxophone solo, and the guitar strum pushing to the peak. I cannot help moving along with it. As I am actually reading into the music for analysis, I realized that there are a few changes in the time signature somewhere in the song. The multiple switches works delicately around the entry of lyrics and various instruments, sectoring the song into four parts which brings a cohesive large image to the song.

class three
sep 22nd
The objective is to make a small animation using Photoshop since the limitation of the software is a nice challenge to the visualization of ideas.
I chose the Chinese punk band脏手指(“Oh! Dirty Fingers'”) 让我给你买包烟("Let me buy you a pack of cig") as the music track. The video is 1-min long and contains 12 scenes and 8 pieces of narration including some repetitions. The yawning scene is based on my photo, and some scenes are based on their posters and their original music video from another song.
I attempted to parallel the visual with the lyrics and the vibe. The editing is also guided by the music. I was struggling with how the video ends and some of the visual of the scenes. It is quite hard to keep a consistency with pixel scenes when combining hand-drew and converted images. In this iteration, I particularly enjoy how the balance and gap between the two types of images.
class two
sep 9nd

We started to get hands-on with the visual aspect of club culture. We briefly discussed some basic rules about composition, colors, visual hierarchy, fonts, texture, etc. After going through the examples of club invitations, posters, and membership cards, I found that the designs are very relevant to its time and related culture.
Alan Tam is a living-icon for Hongkong Cantopop. He was really popular for his young and attractive appearance and voice when he is young. When he started grew older, his voice changed and aged along with his looks to which he quickly adapted and developed a more mature style.
While Tam himself upholds the spirit of advancing with time, I am seeking anachronism in the particular design on the left. I intended to imitate the style of the old Hong Kong CD covers and posters for pop songs with the grey stickers and the golden shaded strip. The color combo is elected and manipulated from the original photo. The design (poorly, which (I think?) is intentional) resembles a poster laying on a red carpet. The red carpet is another element that reminds me of Tam's prime time.
class one
sep 2nd



In Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition, bell hooks addresses performance as "organic resistance", especially African American performance. She points out the gap between survival (masking) and ritual play (creating art) in African American performance and believes that as the ramification of this capitalist white-supremacist society the two divergent aspects of performance have intertwined into the African American performance.
Performance can become an organic resistance because of its accessibility (least material, relying on no physical instrument nor any demanding environment.) Both symbolically and literally, the performers, often when silenced or oppressed, are claiming voices. She also sheds light on how it is a shame that the silenced performers have to communicate via the oppressor's tongue, though she does credit part of the movement for racial uplift to the 19th-century black bourgeois culture. [Shouldn't it be the oppressor's responsibility to initiate the act of transgressing the boundaries and making amends? It is, however, very tricky with identity politics, etc.]
Performance is engagement that requires dialogue and reciprocity. But maybe because performance serves as forces/means for resistance, hook implies sometimes performance needs to overextend its responsibility to reach a larger mass. In many cases, this extension is made upon the sacrifice of its live/present/dialogic nature. [As technologies enable the performers to present the performance in the circulation of representations of representations better and better, is it more reasonable for a performer to sacrifice performance's live and dialogic nature in exchange for the astronomical quantifiable influence, or does it make the circulated product something other than the original form of organic resistance?]
I especially appreciate how hooks also delineates performances as a form of collective recovery. The active narrative in the same context is very inviting and confident. While this active tone ends the passage on performance's undeniable radical potential, I am doubting how performers should retain and realise the radical potential. Looking back at the two divergent aspects of African American performance: survival and rituals, the two wrenching forces defined African American performance. While addressing the importance of black space, my doubts on performance's radical potential apply to most minority groups. Maybe on top of the primary survival aspect, in our capitalist society, the marketability of performance is playing a heavier and heavier role which could greatly dilute the radical power. When the mass influence becomes a euphemism for income, would the performers hold their ground on creating rituals?