Soundscape is a sound or many sounds that forms an immersive environment. These sounds includes natural sounds such as sounds that make by animal and insect; the sounds of natural elements or weather, sounds that created by human-beings. 

The sound of a bee flying.

 In Murray Schafer's book,  he says that the soundscape of the world is changed already, and these sounds turned into noise pollution gradually. The good news is various researches that are related with aspects of the world soundscape is done, and soundscape studies can explain these researches.

Soundscape is categorized into three main themes, keynote sounds, signals, and soundmarks. Keynote is a musical term that identifies the key and tonality of a specific composition. Examples are the sounds of waterfall and birds (The nature).

Signals are foreground sounds. They are sounds that can be listened to consciously and also become signals. Examples are like the sound of bells and horns.

Soundmark is the sound that has unigue qualities that make it specially noticed by the people.
For example, the well-known Hallelujah Chorus in the Messiah. 
 
As an artistic person who likes to visual things, my last music lecture class made me think about sounds more. My class took an interesting field trip on a nice sunny day. The field trip activity seemed simple, people just had to keep quiet and follow along with the professor to the campus center and back to the classroom in the science hall. Meanwhile, we needed to pay attention to the sound that we hear along the trip. Without “visual” and “touch”, can we still recognize the places and the sound from those places?  In the trip, I noticed there were several transactions that were obvious to me, such as the sound of the water nearby the river; the traffic noises between the Union hill and the campus center, and the sound of people chatting in the campus center. Even if I closed my eyes, I think I can still know my location. 


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Here is an interesting video that I found on Youtube about sound in the hair salon.

Copy right is good and also bad at the same time. The good thing is it can protect the original creator's right, and the bad thing is it limits the artist to create things. This reduces the creativity of the artist's work.

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Photography is a tool that people could record something they want, just like writing a dairy.
I love photography, just looking at many different kinds of photos. I love taking photos only when I feel like it. Sometimes I'm lazy about carrying the big camera around, but luckily, cellphones or small cameras make my life better.

All the photos that you can see here are taken during my senior year in high school in Boston. The setting is Downtown and Chinatown. The photo from above looks like it is taken from a movie, it looks like there is a story behind and something just happened that makes people to think and wonder. 

These four photos are portraits. I dressed up my model into Japanese style girly dress. It makes her look very feminine and cute. The great thing about this model is because she has so many facial expressions. It makes the photo more alive. This model in the photos is one of my best friends who went to the same high school with me in Boston. She is from Guang Dong, and we both speak the same language. We become very good friends until now and I'm looking forward to take photos of her again.

According to Garrand’s book “Writing for Multimedia and the Web”, readers would notice the difference between a linear narrative and an interactive narrative is the interactivity between the story and the readers (or players for computer games). The linear narrative structure is simple and organized. It starts from the exposition to the conflict, the climax and the resolution; it starts from the beginning, to the middle, and then the ending. For interactive narrative, categories of stories from different point of view of the characters could gradually develop the story.

In the movie, Run Lola Run, the movie starts with an introduction of many side characters. They are not the main characters for the audience to focus on, but then, they have a great impact on the outcome of the story. Also, I think this movie is non-linear narrative-structured, which leads to many flashbacks and flash forwards of characters, so that the audience could get information from them to understand the story.

        The film, Run Lola Run, is like a video game that one could start it over and over again until it reaches the victory. There are three stories with different results in this movie, and the final results improve from the first story to the last story. The ending, of course, is always a happy ending. There are many surprises in these three stories, which I will not say more in detail. Every decisions or moves that the main characters makes strongly affects the result of the entire story. Run Lola Run is a great movie that could take you to an adventure.

The Differences Between Hypertext and Linear Structure

How hypertext tool writing is different than linear writing? In the essay Hypertext, hypermedia & literary Studies: The State of the Art, Landor and Delany mentioned that linear writing is bounded and fixed. If readers are reading a book, they have to follow the flow of the book and read it to the end. This linear writing structure is for guiding the readers to think as close as the author. Also, readers do not have to think too much in order to finish the reading. Different from Hypertext tool writing structure, Hypertext tool structure takes audience to one place but then it gives audiences the chance to make decisions during the processing of understanding the story.

In my experience, I see hypertext all over on the website, and I would like to talk about one of my favorite websites- Youtube. When I finished watching a music video, there are some related music videos will show up at the end, and I could decide which one I want to watch. This could guide me from one music video to another. My emotions and thoughts would affect my choice. It naturally makes me to get involved with the content and knows which music videos that I would be more interested in.

The easiest way to think of a linear writing example is reading a book. A book has content and it shows how many chapters there are in order to complete the whole story. Readers could guess about the ending while reading, but there is no other choice except skipping other chapters to find out the end of the story. Therefore, readers are fixed to read along the first chapter to the last chapter. Readers cannot really make any choices during the process of knowing the story.

The Four Elements

In my experience, movies and books that I have seen and read, there is always a basic story-telling structure. The Classical Narrative Structure- It is one of the most popular and common way of story-telling in nowadays. As Garand mentioned in his article, a classical narrative structure has four important parts: the Exposition, the Conflict, the Climax and the Resolution, and these four elements are clearly showed in the movie that I have seen lately.

In the movie Citizen Kane, the setting is located in America, and the period of time is approximately around 1860 to 1950. In the first scene of the movie, a hand and a glass ball appears. Then, a scary-looking castle and a lying dead man on the bed come up, and soon, the word- Rosebud appears and goes away. This specific way to start a story is called the fore-shadowing. It means the author of the story gives the audience a hint to know about the end of the story in the beginning of the story. Next, the movie takes the audience back to Charles Foster Kane’s childhood. During the time when Charles is playing in the snow with his precious sled, his mother Mary Kane and his father Jim Kane are having a meeting with a banker named Walter Thatcher in the house. Surprisingly, Mary is in charge of everything in the house instead of Jim. Audience could tell Mary and her husband is not in a good condition, and she desperately wants Jim to stay away from Charles. Then, she makes the decision to sale her son to Thatcher. When Mary tells Charles to go with Thatcher, Charles gets very emotional and angry, he tries to convince her mother from sending him away with his violent behavior, unluckily he was sent away with Thatcher and he never seen his parents again. This is one of my favorite scenes, and I think it is also a very important scene that shows how Charles is affected deeply after this horrible experience.

The story keeps building up through interviews with people that know about Charles by a reporter called Jerry Thompson. From the interviews, it shows Charles has conflicts with these people before. In the movie, there are many conflicts such as arguments between Charles and Thatcher, Charles and his first wife, and Charles and his friend Jedediah Leland. Among all these conflicts, the main conflict is the big fight between his first wife, his mistress Susan Alexander and Gettys.  Charles is trying to control the press coverage of his career in politics; on the other hand, he is trying to end his affair with Susan. This conflict guides to the climax of the movie, which is the most exciting part in the movie. Charles decides to choose to stay with Susan (his second wife), and he sends his wife and Gettys away. This scene is very intense because Charles shows his frustration aggressively when he has to make the decision in that situation. After this scene, the rhythm of the entire movie shows down, the resolution of the movie approaches, and Charles gets marry with Susan and loses in the election.

A story is like a cake. People add or take away the ingredients to make a cake that they think it would taste good. The base of a cake is important because it holds the entire body while the cake is developing, just like the four basic elements in the Classical Narrative structure. I like this movie and I prefer watching a movie that shows (acts) how the story goes instead of tells (speaks) the audience what is actually happening.