Reading Response 3

The article I selected to read was that of Pauline Oliveros entitled "Deep Listening: Bridge to Collaboration." I opted to read this article because of my interest in music and creating things that are new. I began reading and my attention was grabbed by her explanation of her collaboration experiences and her views on them.

The essay talked about the importance of collaborating and the mutual listening that needs to be achieved in order for the collaboration to be successful. She then went on to talk about her meditation of Deep Listening where you listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening. Listening is much more important to her than reading or writing notation. Phenomenal musicians are listening to each other and in turn learning of new techniques and sounds which is causing boundaries of genres to dissolve and give birth to new styles and sounds. She also went on to talk about Sonic Meditations. Sonic Meditations are ways of listening and scores are transmitted orally rather than with conventional musical notation.

I am very interested in these concepts that Pauline discussed as a musician and an artist. Her ideas of learning by listening seem way stronger than that of reading out of a book. Not that books are bad, it is just that actually learning by first hand experience seems way more interactive and effective to me. Plus, without notation or script, improvisation is pushed often creating more originality and understanding. I also feel a lot is being missed in day to day life by just filtering out noises rather than embracing each sound. I plan on utilizing these concepts much more frequently having read these articles.

Video Hardware/Software Response

1. Overall, I found my experiences with the Olympus digital camera to be quite enjoyable. My one criticism of the camera though is that it takes a really long time to take a picture. This didn't really bother me too much because I wasn't taking any action photographs so the criticism isn't that big of a deal. The quality of the video and photos the camera took were superb to my standards. It did everything it needed to for my image capturing strategies of finding colors and filming upside down. The only way to make the camera better I would say is to have the picture be taken right when you hit the button.

2. Initially I tried using Quicktime Pro for editing my video but was instantly frustrated. It was too hard to move clips around and edit them to fit my sounds so I quickly transferred to iMovie where all my dreams were made possible. All I really needed was a timeline and iMovie supplied that for me. I will for sure be using this program for future projects. Everything is pretty straight forward allowing you to easily and efficiently organize your sound and video as you please.