For the conceptual unit, we were challanged to respond to a statment we actually picked out of a hat, completley randomly. I explored the feeling of being humiliation through the experience of listening to music. For me, this meant the process of listening to other producer's music, that personally, I find very forced and simple. Constantly humiliated, but always trying to reach the top from the bottom for pride and not the money.

In design, we were challanged to make a piece using illustrator or photoshop for digital art, and some form of fine art, and integrate the two into one piece. For the fine art component of my piece, I chose to use colored pencils and markers. This wound up becoming the blueprint I used in the piece, after I scanned it and put it into illustrator. For my digital art, I used illustrator to create everything you will see, other than the blue print I replaced with digital figures.

In Web, we worked tirelessly on our conceptual music, and website, the very one that you are on now. We were asked to make background for each of the sections to support our point of views, and I felt that money falling during a rave was an accurate representation of how some of the EDM producers view their fans today. You can find the music I was talking about in my "music" section.

In English, we learned how to create various poems. These poems included Haikus, Spoken word poems, 10 line poems, and more. All of these poems will be further explained in my "poem" section as well as the stylized versions of my poems, using illustrator or photoshop.

In english, we created all types of poems that you’ve probably never even heard of! Once again, all these poems were created off my topic of how “I’m exploring the feeling of humiliation through listening to music.” Therefore, I was asked to create my Haiku, 10-Line Poem, and Spoken Word Poem on this particular subject. Each of the poems differentiated themselves, and though it was difficult to go from creating such a short poem to a large poem, I felt they all held their own purpose and meanings in a very cool sort of way.

To begin, I wanted to reflect on the Haiku. A Haiku poem consists of three different lines that follow a five syllable, seven syllable, five syllable format. Within a Haiku, at any point and time within the poem, you’ll be able to find the Kireji, otherwise known as the cutting word, the Kigo, or seasonal clue, and the tone of the poem. The tone, perhaps, is(are) the most important word(s) of the poem as it’s the word that defines that attitude.

My haiku is relatively hard to follow because there’s no context nor real subject given. My poem was picturing when I was found in my room one rainy day listening to pandora. I share a passion for EDM music, or Electronic Dance Music, and I’ve followed many artists that produce my favorite types of songs. Eventually I came across a song that was fairly popular at the time, and it consisted of a simple back beat that led up to a drop. The drop was one note playing at different intervals, something that sounded absolutely repulsive to the trained ear. I thought to myself, “how could someone possibly like this”, and realizing that my music wasn’t even listened to, I felt humiliated.

The next portion was the 10-Line Poem. A 10-line poem, obviously enough, consists of 10 lines or more that uses abstract concepts to convey the idea at hand. The topics won’t necessarily be comprehendible because each of the ideas are usually personal arguments made by the artist.

In my 10-Line Poem, I had some pretty abstract topics that I will define here. To begin, I mentioned the thorn maze because that’s how I viewed the music industry: a back stabbing business that has qualities like a maze as you’re trying to get out of the bottom and rise to the top. The weeks for a lone piece section was describing how long I usually spend on a song, and how the “simplicity, severity and sinistry” of another artist brings me down because they spend no time on their songs.

The poem takes a turn for the sadness as I began to talk about how I felt stuck under a bolder and in a maze. I’m outweighed, stating how I view the other artists as such a high priority on the scale of things. I realize that it will take me years upon years to rise to the top, so the depression that is found in the second section summarizes my emotions.

Lastly, the Spoken Word Poem. The spoken word poem consists of 25 lines or more and encourages the use of emotion and reality to convey the tone of your subject. The figure of the poem can change based on its uniqueness. For example, if there’s a rise and fall in your poem, you could make your happy beginning statements nearing the right side, and your more depressing statements on the left side, so it makes the shift in tone feel more intense.

In this poem, I really went off on the fact that I am in the music industry for my passion and not money. I’m sick and tired of the way some of these producers are becoming complete and utter sell outs. I began with an uplifting tone, a tone in which people would say I had the potential to become famous in the music industry. My tone switched right when I stated that “I am vulnerable” to show my mood swings during the process of creating a song. It also bring the vibe of humiliation, which in the end, was the entire purpose of this project. The shape of the poem was entirely intentional. As a reader, when you see lines nearing the right side the page, it’s thought to be increasing, as if it’s building up for a bigger meaning. Right when it hits the part where I say “I am vulnerable”, I decided to have the lines to begin fading back towards the left side to show how I’m losing the intensity that I was nearing. I feel that this also gave the feeling that I was trying to convey, because when you are brought all the way up for nothing, that is nearing the definition of humiliation.

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In Design, we were asked to create a picture that represented our subject (my subject is listed above) and we were to do this through different fine art and digital mediums. For my subject, I viewed myself in the middle of a concert where all I heard was awful music that took no talent to create, whereas everyone else was in love with the music that was playing. This is what I chose to draw about, and instead of my face I used an ear to represent listening, and I made myself red to show the frustration and humiliation I was facing. The black substance surrounding me is how I feel on a daily basis as an EDM producer, as one that focuses on creating melodies rather than making money, it hurts me to listen to these tracks that take no musical talent whatsoever. The one-hundred dollar bills surrounding me were to represent how some of the DJ’s now a days view the audiences, as they strive for quantity and wealth rather than quality and pride. The rainbows around the one-hundred dollar bills are to represent how they interpret the music.

The mediums I used in this picture varied from the fine arts process to the digital process. I created my fine art picture through sharpies, markers and colored pencils. I like to outline the main subjects in marker, such as the perimeter of the dollar bills, and once finished I color it in with colored pencil. I view it as a nice transition from one to the next as you can tell where each figure is at and how proportionally. I used a black colored pencil to fill in the void around me as I thought that it would represent how the darkness isn’t exactly solid, but rather a inconsistent pasture just as it is in real life; you can always get out of your trapped situations. Once we finished our fine arts picture, we scanned our images and then used either Illustrator or Photoshop to edit our drawings. I chose to use Photoshop as I feel that the campus is more interactive. I also liked the thought that it’s really one big picture and not a bunch of layers to deal with. To create the rainbow background, I removed the original colored in rainbow and replaced it with a gradient that held the same colors in the picture, only these were solid lines. I proceeded by filling in any empty gaps with a solid dark texture to represent how the dollar bills weren’t going anywhere any time soon. I replaced the color of skin and filled it with red to better represent the humiliation process, and I decided to keep the black on the floor for the reasons I described earlier.

We were asked to create a musical piece by using one of the programs we had been practicing in Freestyle, which is either Reason, Pro Tools, or Both. We wanted to make music as we wanted a nice rhythm to accompany our whole website, as scrolling through all the different sections would be relatively plain without music in the background. Therefore, once we implement the musical pieces into our website, it should make the website easier to follow, and more interesting at that.

The music was inspired by our conceptual idea, and knowing that my whole topic was about listening to music, it wasn’t too difficult to convey the idea of listening to music. Perhaps it was to convey the positive side of starting from the bottom. The music sounds so plain and soft at first, but is soon accompanied by inspirational string instruments and drums. This is to show that if you started from the bottom, as you keep moving forward, things will only get better to the point where you’re hearing an entire symphony.

I used many different techniques to create the song that I made in Reason. To begin, I chose reason because there’s a simplicity about the program that really catches my attention. I love how you can look through all your different digital audio equipments and plug/unplug each of them to the desired location. I also enjoyed creating different moods and sounds by adjusting the pitch knobs to make a particular note sound higher than the others, or lower. Through all these practices, I was able to create my song to my liking, and that really benefited the tone of the website. Like I said before, I started soft, and I kept stacking different instruments on to create the impression that “it all gets better”. I did this by creating more instruments within Reason, and having multiple tracks for each one. For example on the piano track, if you listen closely you can hear that it has two different octaves. I did this by having one octave on one layer, and the second octave on another layer, and they automatically combine into one harmonious sound.

Overall, I really enjoyed creating the music as this has always been my passion. I am thoroughly interested in continuing this next year as I’m really beggining to develop an ongoing relationship with Reason because there’s so much you can do with that program! Additionally, if I ever wanted to add in vocals or an actual instrument that you can find within reason, I could always use the Reason add on in ProTools, and implement them into ProTools from there! I can’t wait!

As a part of being in WebAudio, we were asked to create an animated poem for one of our poems. We were able to choose from our 10-Line or Spoken Word poem, and I decided to choose my 10-Line poem. I chose this because I felt I could convey the most emotion into the animation because of the abstract ideas it withheld.

Our whole project was based off the sentence that you’re feeling ____ through the experience of ______, so because mine was feeling humiliation through the experience of listening to music, that is what inspired my poem. As a music producing teenager, it’s hard to start from the bottom and slowly make your way up to the top. When I hear other producers making simple music, I begin to feel humiliated because I spend so much time on every one of my songs, and almost none of them are listened to. This is why I felt that my animation was so inspirational because I felt so deeply for this context.

I coordinated each of the main ideas by implementing them into the animation. For example, when I said that “Rain hits the windows…” I would make sure I had the rain emotionally hitting the windows. I would then yield to the next part by beginning a stroke of that color from a corner, and when I then say “random sounds on my eardrums…” I can make those strokes into myself and earbuds listening to music. It was a rather flawless idea.

Producing the animated poem was relatively difficult at first because I wasn’t used to using Flash as my animation application, but rather Toon Boom. After a while, I came to like using Flash because the onion skins, which is when it shows where the figures were in the last frame, were actually working unlike they were in Toon Boom. The process was definitely made a lot easier than Toon Boom because I wouldn’t have to keep worrying about how far apart my figures had to be.