I remembered to write this time! As the titles implies, this is a bit more of an Academic update, as I have been and will be in Dundee for a few weeks in a row getting a bunch of midterm review material ready.
A quick course refresher: I’m in Audio Programming (CMP404), Network Systems for Games (CMP303), and Digital Sociology (SOC203). The material I’ve been working on for each class has been fairly interesting, even the sociology work! I’ll outline the basics so this isn’t too horribly boring.
For Audio Programming, we don’t really have a midterm because it’s a 400-level course! Sweet right? Well, kind of sweet. We’ve actually been working on our final projects (at least I have) since day one. The goal of the project is to demonstrate our knowledge of, you guessed it, audio programming, which focuses on our ability to manipulate and create audio through code and other technology. For this assignment, I am creating a little experience/simulation in Unity, a game engine. The overall goal is to turn an environment, like the inside of an apartment, into a visualizer for sounds. I have a form of synesthesia connected to music, but it isn’t color-music like the most common form we all think of. I associate music with shapes, but they’re never simple squares and triangles and spheres, so I couldn’t figure out a feasible way to represent that. Instead, I am focusing on color-sound synesthesia by visualizing sound as colors in the space. The catch is that the space will look pretty bleak, as there won’t be any textures and colors present. The only way to bring color into the environment will be with sound!
For Network Systems for Games, we are being tasked with creating a multiplayer (networked) game by hand. This means that we are programming client (player) functions as well as server functions. I’m going to attempt to use my Audio Programming project as a base for this one. This means that you will be in your apartment, looking at all the pretty colors and listening to music, but you’ll be able to have a friend over who sees and hears the same thing, from virtually anywhere. At least, that’s what I hope will happen. It’s quite difficult to actually get all this working in a nice, clean way. It’ll be awesome if I can get it up and running!
Finally, Digital Sociology. Here, I actually do have a midterm that is 3 essays. We were given 5 prompts to choose from, and I’ve got 2/3 essays complete. I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy writing these as much as I did, but the first one I chose deals with how people present themselves over social media, especially focusing on how refined these images can get and how these images change depending on the type of profile being used (public vs private). The second essay investigates the roles of intelligent machines (AI) in contemporary society. As a programmer interested in AI, I did some technical research to disprove the commonly-spread stigma that AI will take over everything and it’s going to happen SOON, like Terminator movies. In reality, that’s terribly over-exaggerated. My third essay will be on virtual worlds like video games, and how social structures from the real world have been translated and imported into those worlds and how, in some cases, video games have created their own social orders.
That will be all for now, but there should be another post coming from me in the next week or two, and hopefully one from my collaborator Tessa!
Thanks for reading – CS
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