I really thought I was ahead of the curve this week, deciding to work with compression right out of the gate. As Aiden mentioned in his blog, though, it turned out to be more challenging to actually do something with it. While not nearly as frustrating as JavaScript, working with several very complicated audio programs and trying to accomplish something about which I have only a tenuous understanding at best, proved to be pretty goddamn frustrating.

Reading Diana’s blog, I’m pleased to report that I wasn’t the only one to run into some technical difficulties this week. I may have to enlist the wizard in my quest to make the Makey Makey control the key.

Unfortunately, Aiden and I were ultimately unsuccessful in compressing our sound files down to unintelligibility. I thought it was really cool that we were able at least to hear the compression as it was happening, but that wasn’t our goal. Scott mentioned that many programs have a built-in threshold that only lets the user compress things so far, and he suggested compressing the file, saving it as a bigger file, and then compressing it again. I thought I was doing that, but I couldn’t hear any difference. So, either I wasn’t doing what I thought I was doing or else I just have to do it several hundred more times.

Nathaniel suggested de compressing a file to kind of “blow it up,” as it were. That sounds like a really interesting thing to try, and I’m going to look into it this week. Hopefully I can somehow incorporate into my as-of-yet-undetermined final project. I think I’d like to try doing something with a video file, but I’m afraid to open yet another can of worms that I won’t know how to handle.