Aural Terrains - Week 1

For the first week we were split into two groups to go on some little school excursions.

Sound Walk:
On Thursday the group that I was in went on a sound walk. This involved a walk around the city listening to the noises around us. This was a new experience and quite interesting. Although I am in the city every week day I don't usually intentionally listen to all of the sounds around me which is what we had to do. The hardest thing about it I think was that we had to put sound before sight. I'm used to relying on sight first and when listening automatically associating the sounds with the visual. However, the purpose of the walk was to put sound before sight which I've now discovered is not as easy as it sounds(pun not intentional).

Acoustic Lab:
The next day, Friday, I went with my group to the acoustic lab/department at Auckland Uni (I think that's what it's called anyway). There we did a number of different activities. We were given a sort of lecture about sound and hearing which was quite interesting. After that, our group was split into another 4 to rotate around some other activities.

Following the sound journey of my group:
We went into a different room and listened to multiple different sounds and then had a little test to see if we could correctly identify the decibels and something else(I can't exactly remember what it was...) of each one. I wasn't exactly terrific at that ...

We then went into the anechoic chamber which was also interesting and definitely a new experience. Unfortunately though you should never do something new with specific expectations. It wasn't as impressive as I was expecting it but it definitely was something that I hadn't experienced before. And everything did sound a lot louder after we left the room.

After that we went into a reverberation(?) chamber which was obviously very loud and reverberationy(not a spelling mistake : ) ). I did enjoy that room actually.

And finally we went back to the small lecture room that we had started in and had our hearing tested. Overall, and interesting an quite enjoyable day.

Overview of iPhone application project

Leading up to and just before we started the iPhone applications I wasn't sure whether or not I was going to enjoy it. In my mind it had the potential to be interesting and possibly fun but depended largely on whether or not I was good at it.

We started off just doing some exercises mainly just following instructions and also printed chapters from a book. I actually found all of that quite interesting and was liking it a lot more than the two weeks of processing. After the first couple of days I was finding that I also seemed to be better at the iPhone programming than the processing. I think one reason may be that xcode is more visual than processing and with interface builder I can see how that code needs to be linked to the buttons etc.

Our first project/exercise out of two was to add some extra features to a stopwatch. The next and more complicated project was to design and create our own applications. This had the the option of working either in pairs or individually. Jess and I decided to work together and the idea that we came up with was to make a movie quiz.

For the first week of the holidays we both worked individually on the project and then met up at the beginning of the second week. Throughout the rest of the holidays we were able to work well together by combining the work that we had each done and together coming up with what we wanted to do. We each did specific parts of the code and then again combined them, as well as adding other parts as we thought of them.

I was pleased with our final app and quite unexpectedly enjoyed the project.