No Nunes-sense: Composition as Composition

For my final project, I decided to try and learn to do overdubs in iMovie, a la Julia Nunes, teaching myself through YouTube tutorials and trial and error. I love the way Nunes is able to transform a video-editing program into a recording studio, mixing music and video simultaneously. Her method, and that of similarly inclined YouTubers, brings to mind issues of materiality and (digital) literacy, while also challenging the regime of media professionals that evolved in the pre-digital age.

The very way I try to describe this endeavor, "overdubs in iMovie," shows how misguided about the whole thing I was. "Overdubs" is a word better suited to an audio-recording program such as Garage Band, with which I have some familiarity. Learning how to do this has convinced me that iMovie needs to be thought of in terms of video before it can be used for audio.

I started with some basic knowledge of iMovie: I'd made some very simple videos on my digital camera that I'd transferred to iMovie, and I'd filmed myself with the iMac's built-in camera. But I'd never edited any of the videos I'd made. They were stored and shared as unmanipulated chunks of video.

My first challenge was simply getting comfortable with iMovie 11. Because our home computer died earlier this year (causing a brief but intense panic), we bought a new iMac, complete with the latest version of iLife. The new iMovie looks nothing like the one I was accustomed to, so I had to figure out basics,  such as how do I record myself again?

But once that was out of the way, I was ready to dig in. Here's a brief, unimaginative clip (coincidentally shot on my birthday):

I needed some basic video to try and add more audio to. Thanks to this tutorial, I found a very easy way to add another layer of audio. Just by hitting the Voiceover button in iMovie, one can easily create and layer multiple audio tracks.

Aside from being confusing, this didn't really accomplish what I wanted. With Voiceover, I could definitely "overdub," but it felt like cheating. I wasn't really learning how to splice and layer video. To help me toward this end, I found a slew of YouTube videos on a number of topics:

• L-cut demo
• Video and audio + audio track added separately
• Audio editing
• PiP, cut-away, side-by-side view
• Screen set-up
• New features in audio editing for iMovie 11
• Using clip trimmer for audio
• Layering audio
• Adjusting audio and video
• Audio ducking
• More audio editing
• Lip-sync song
• Sync audio

I wish I could say that watching all these videos made me an expert in iMovie, but they really just helped me get acclimated. Certainly they got me excited about the potential for what can be done in the program, but it's difficult for me to know how to do something without actually doing it. And none of the videos specifically address the technique I was trying to learn. I was a little surprised that no one had made a "How to Make a Music Video Like Nunes" video.

One important thing I learned with the help of YouTube was how to make an L-cut. In such a cut, audio from one video clip continues while another video clip starts playing. These things are hard to explain, so here's an example:

The L-cut basically allows you to manipulate audio and video on separate paths, which is essential for composing a music video entirely in iMovie. I discovered that using the precision editor in iMovie lets you meld two clips and extend the audio past the point where one clip switches to another. The program also displays the audio for each clip as a wave form, providing a visual representation of the sound.

So I started a new project in iMovie and filmed myself playing guitar. I found that iMovie does not let you record another video while an existing video is playing, so I exported the guitar video as a .m4v file and called it "Guitar1." Then I played it back with Quicktime, through headphones, while recording another video in iMovie. This allowed me to play along with myself, much as one would when creating multiple tracks in Garage Band or ProTools.

I thought that the L-cut would allow me to "mix" my two guitar videos easily, but it didn't. I had a really difficult time getting the two parts synced. And once I did, I couldn't splice the video at all without completely unsyncing the audio. Everything about this first attempt at a music video failed.

Part of my problem was that I was thinking too much in terms of audio, or in terms of Garage Band or ProTools. In such programs, audio is layered track by track and then mixed. But I needed to be thinking visually as well as aurally. How was I going to mix and match video and audio together?

So I scrapped my first attempt and started another project. I would use guitar, hand percussion, and glockenspiel to create a very simple music video in iMovie. Each instrument would require a slightly different "look," or costume, so that the visual cuts would matter. And I would build the video clip by clip, rather than trying to sync the audio first and then manipulate the video.

As it turned out, I was able to do the "track" mixing, clip building, and audio/video syncing fairly easily. Once I figured out how, that is.

First, I "eyeballed it" with three video clips, one for each instrument: first guitar, then snap/claps, then glock. I used the precision editor to get the guitar and the snap/claps aligned correctly. But I wasn't sure how I was going to get the glock layer to work. I had learned to use the precision editor kind of by accident, just exploring the options you can get for each clip that you drag into the project window. My use of it was intuitive, and it was hard to apply that intuition to specific problems.

Then I had an important breakthrough: it's really easy to split audio from video in iMovie (duh!). Just by going to the Clip menu and clicking "detach audio," you can make separate audio tracks for each video. The selected clip will then have no audio of its own, but that's perfect for building a music video. You can then add the clips you want, line them up using the precision editor and the audio wave forms, mute the audio on the new clips, and extend the separate audio tracks beneath the video to the end of the project.

With each clip added, you extend the audio below the clips in the project window, which corresponds to a yellow line over your clips in the events window. This yellow line helps you figure out which clips you've already used as well as where your project is in real time. With that information, it's much easier to select the clips that you're going to add to your project without throwing off the syncing entirely. Then the precision editor can be used to fine-tune the syncing.

All of this is probably confusing in words. It would have been better if I had made a video to describe the process, because then all of the intuitive contextual things that I take for granted in describing would be intuitive to the viewer as well. But that's a bit beyond what I'm capable of in iMovie at this point (and this project is due today!).

So, without further ado, here's the video:

I must say, it was a huge relief to complete it. That being said, there is plenty of room for improvement.

I'm not thrilled about some of the cuts toward the beginning. The first one, from guitar to snaps, is about right, but then the subsequent cut has too much of the glock video (which is crummy because you can't even see the glock). It was right around this point that I learned to separate the audio from the video. When I tried to cut up that longish glock segment, it broke up the audio in ways that frightened me. So I said "screw it" and moved on. Looking back, it would have been easy enough to just delete the extant glock clip in the project window and start building again from the snaps--it was still early in the editing process--but I was still too unsure of what I was doing.

By the end I had become much more confident. Some of the cuts get a little crazy, and not all of the video is truly compelling, but I threw in some clips that weren't at all related to the real-time audio, which was fun and added a nice effect.

According to this interview, it takes Julia Nunes about two hours to make a video. When I read that, I thought, no effing way, but now that I've spent a couple weeks learning the skills involved, two hours sounds less than superhuman (but still faster than me). Considering composing in iMovie as a new form of literacy enabled by technology, Nunes is fluent and I'm still a neophyte, but I can see a whole new set of expressive possibilities sprouting from this skill set. I'm probably already near the point in the learning curve where "fun" outweighs "annoying."

It's worth noting that my final video has no verbal component whatsoever (except maybe my kids' noises). It is composition as composition, and it provides insight into writing by analogy. Music has the enviable ability to blend different voices simultaneously, and video can efficiently present visual information without using up a lot of descriptive words.

Writers seek the right turn of phrase to describe a scene or character without overburdening a reader with information, and they also seek to combine multiple, often conflicting ideas from a variety of sources in some logical or aesthetic way. The iMovie-composed music video enables a different kind of intertextuality, a dialogue between sound and vision, and the process of arranging clips sequentially presents an infinity of options not unlike those writers must face. The trick is in putting it all together.

Acknowledgments:
In addition to Julia Nunes and the YouTube-verse, I would like to thank my daughter, Desi, for contentedly sitting on the couch during filming; my son, Henry, for not hurting himself or knocking the camera over during filming; and my wife, Mercedes, for having an acoustic Telecaster and a glockenspiel.

Beliefs about Writing and Learning Revisited

1. In your experience, why do some people appear to be good at writing while others struggle?

I think at some point I started viewing writing competitively. A girl I knew in high school wrote really well, and I wanted to write as well as her. I wasn't terribly aware of or interested in struggles other people might have been having with writing. Nor did I have any idea what my college major would be. I was pretty self-absorbed, and probably just reacting to certain dynamics of the classroom.

People appear to struggle with writing only when they're writing to an audience they don't understand. If a student is texting a friend, it's not likely to be a struggle. But if a student has to write a paper according to completely different conventions for a teacher who is essentially a representative of an "academic" audience, that same student may struggle.

So if I became a good writer, it was probably because I wanted to excel in relation to my peers (especially if they were cute), whereas those who struggled simply had different relations to different peers (cute or otherwise).

2. Is writing a talent, or is it a skill? Is it both? If so, how? What does it mean to say that something is a "talent"? What does it mean to call something a skill?

I'm going to call "talent" personality, and I'm going to call "skill" technique. Anyone can learn a technique, regardless of personality. But different personalities gravitate to different techniques for a variety of reasons, and it can get fairly complicated. In the best-case scenario, personality and technique fuse in a satisfying expressive experience. The degree to which the experience is satisfying is often contingent on the social reception of the expression, or its interpretation. That interpretation is two-sided, including both the person doing the expressing and his or her audience, and it can change over time depending on how memories, experience, and discussion shape it. So merit and accomplishment are entirely fluid. But the degree to which the illusion of consensus regarding merit and accomplishment is maintained can have an enormous influence on the formation of personality and the application of technique. So this is why "talent" has become a value-laden stand-in for "personality." Similarly, "skill" implies mastery, whereas "technique" implies functionality.

3. How is writing best learned? Why? What do you think are some of the biggest impediments or difficulties people face when trying to learn to write better?

I guess practice is probably the best way to learn, although it helps to get pointers along the way. I remember feeling that writing was largely intuitive, and I got lucky that much of my intuition was informed by a bookish family background. This is tricky though because everyone learns differently. And a lot hinges on context. Practice with good pointers and feedback, along with opportunities for imaginative or self-guided exercises, is probably the best bet.

I think I said at the beginning of the semester that language fluency could be an impediment to learning to write. I still think that's true, though I would modify "language fluency" to be more nuanced. It has to do with stylistic fluency, or knowledge of expectations, intuitive or otherwise. That stuff needs to be as clear as possible. It should also be clear that no single set of conventions satisfies every writing task.

4. Close your eyes and take a few minutes to picture someone in the act of writing. Who are they? What do they look like? Where are they? What exactly are they doing? Describe the scene in as much detail as possible.

Writers are everywhere. On the train with smart-phones, in offices, in libraries, and so on. I like the idea of a very broad definition of writing: songwriting, video editing, Web design, copywriting, novel writing, technical writing, writing checks, skywriting, speechwriting, texting, tweeting, blogging, vlogging, tumbling, sampling, quoting, etc.

5. Where do you think this image of "writing" comes from? In what ways do you think this image actually represents what most people do when they write? Stepping back for a moment, are there writers or types of writing that probably aren't well reflected by this image you just described?

I think this image of writing comes from this past semester. Composition theory has a million ways of talking about "texts" and "writing." There is contextual functionality and there is the inherited, historical notion of book writing, which is dominated in my mind by the "literary." It would seem there is a profound tension between the two at this particular moment in history, brought about by technological remediation. I guess writers who aren't well reflected by this image are those who use pen and paper. I forgot to mention them!

6. What is a "technology"? How do you define the term? When you think of technologies, what kinds of things do you think about? Is writing itself a technology? How? Or why not?

I have the contemporary tendency to think of technology in terms of wires, gadgets, computers, solar panels, rocket ships, and the like, although I think it's fundamentally related to the idea of "technique" mentioned above. The technology is the tool or the combination of tools or the process, and the technique is how to use them. I think writing is a technology. Whether writing programming code or Greek poetry, writing is the technology that enables those techniques.

Writing is also a technology in the sense of the broad definition of "writing" given above. Yet it is like a component technology, or a metaphoric one. Is it possible to have a metaphoric technology? Um . . . yes. See Nietzsche.

7. Have you heard the term "writing process" before? What does this phrase mean to you? What is the "writing process" and how does it work?

I have head the term before. I forget what it is, if I ever knew. Something like outline, research, draft, revise. I never use outlines, but maybe I should. Usually I start with research to see where it leads. Then I write around it to try and make an argument, narrative, or analysis. That's a "process," right?

I like what we talked about this semester regarding the "moves of academic writing," as well as rhetorical principles involving audience and intention. It seems obvious in retrospect, but such ideas get de-emphasized in literary study.

8. Is writing a private thing, a social thing, or both? In what ways?

The work of writing often feels private, and this can enable thoughts to go unguarded and explored in more detail than in conversation. This can be a liberating aspect of it. But sharing the writing is social, and even when composing, choices are being made that are communicative. And the ideas and language being used are drawn from some social process, even if it happens to be written.

9. When people talk about "illiteracy," what do you think they are talking about? Who is illiterate in this country? What are some of the primary causes of illiteracy? Is illiteracy a problem?

Usually people talk about "illiteracy" in terms of the inability to read and write alphabetic texts. But my answer to this question is probably the most different from what it was at the beginning of the semester. If literacy is determined by one's ability to grasp and utilize media for expressive purposes, then I am functionally illiterate in all kinds of ways. I have a rudimentary ability to make videos. I've improved substantially as a blogger. I still have no idea how to make a Web site. I'm decent at recording music. I don't Tweet. I don't Tumble. My Facebooking is pretty perfunctory. I've never contributed to Wikipedia, even just to try and get away with a lie. I can't read braille. I don't know sign language or semaphores. Basically I just know a little bit about books.

So by this logic causes of illiteracy are too many to mention. It sort of depends. Is it a problem? That also depends. What does a person want to accomplish? For whom? Why? What are the best means and methods?

10. How have writing and rhetoric changed in the digital age? That is, how has technology affected the way people communicate? Is this a good or a bad thing? Why?

Technology has greatly expanded our communicative options and made us more aware of what each option emphasizes or de-emphasizes. Techniques that were prohibitively expensive a generation ago--film making and multi-track recording, for example--are now available to anyone with a computer. We now can consider: do I want to send an email or a postcard? Which would be more fun? Do emails with resumes attached need to be written according to cover-letter conventions, or should they be less formal? Or should job seekers just direct potential employers to their LinkedIn profile?

It's a good thing in the sense that it provides all kinds of options that weren't there before. It may even enable the alteration of power structures that seemed untouchable--the music business is a good example. It can be a bad thing in the sense that learning and embracing the new is often stressful. Why can't we just sit back in whatever world we're most comfortable in and have a couple drinks? I guess that can be a little anti-social.

In Which I Box Myself In

• From http://www.postcolonialweb.org/zimbabwe/music/kwaramba14.html:

In Africa especially, songs have continuously played an important role in shaping social relationships. In early oral societies songs, dance and performance embodied the people's aspirations and expectations. Africans graced almost all occasions with songs and dance. They sang and danced for joy, grief, love, sorrow, hate and even during labour and work. For most African societies, rhythm was an inextricable part of their everyday existence. Songs were therefore an expression of a whole people's experiences and not an individual's property, hence the existence of Shona hunting songs, Nguni bridal songs, Zulu war songs, to cite but a few examples. The music summarised the experiences of a whole people and were communally owned and enjoyed. It was the music of the people, about the people and by the people themselves.

• From http://www.postcolonialweb.org/zimbabwe/music/kwaramba15.html:

One major change that the choir concept effected was to cut a clear division between those who were "gifted with voices" and those who were not, who consequently became the audience in a society where, before, virtually everyone was considered a singer in their own way.

• From The Jazz Book:

The message of jazz is not only "Be yourself." Jazz is also telling us "Free yourself." Jazz is a music of community, of being together, of sharing, of skill, of negotiation: ultimately, of the ability to communicate. (xiii)


Old New Orleans must have been an incredibly musical city. We know of some thirty orchestras from the first decade of the twentieth century. To appreciate what that means, you have to know that the Crescent City had little more than two hundred thousand inhabitants then. And in a city of that size, there were thirty orchestras, playing a vital, new kind of music. (6-7)

• From Eric Havelock's "The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences":

a nonliterate culture is not necessarily a primitive one

• Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose: (Too bad you can't embed non-YouTube videos into a Blogger template. Or at least not without some html knowledge. I'm particularly interested in what John Philip Sousa said in 1906, regarding community singing. Also, the "infernal machines," record players.)

• Dizzy Gillespie, "Tin Tin Deo":

The above bullets constitutes some "box" research. I've decided to turn my blog post into an experiment with box-based construction, as well as sort of a proposal for my final project. (Plus it helps me get some of my thoughts organized.)

My idea is this:

Ear players play music by ear. Many of them cannot or do not read music. Yet they can express themselves wonderfully. I think this parallels much of our class discussion regarding print literacy, moral panics, and so forth.

For centuries, ear players, folk musicians, what you will, were not able to preserve their individual work. They could only pass down a tradition. Then came the record player. In less than 100 years, an entire regime of taste--one dominated by written music and musicians who could read and therefore perform it--was replaced by a regime of taste based on personal authenticity and expressivity. Just compare Louis Armstrong with Pavoratti.

Classical music tends not to resonate as strongly with contemporary listeners. It lacks wildness, abandon, informality. You're not supposed to sing along and dance, you're supposed to listen and respect. That says it all.


The new regime of taste, symbolized by Armstrong, quickly evolved. By the time you get to Dizzy Gillespie above (and I personally will usually choose to listen to Dizzy before Louis), jazz is an art music. How and why this came about is mysterious, but the bebop moment is clearly the moment of departure. Rock and roll would get people dancing again, and jazz would quickly start to feel as distant to many listeners as classical music. Some even call jazz "America's classical music."


To digress a bit further, Frank Zappa has some interesting commentary on taste-making:

So laissez faire cigar chompers are better stewards of taste than "hip" or "educated" people. Who are the gatekeepers of the market place?

But before I try to sort all that out, which is probably beyond the scope of this semester, I should focus on the following. New Orleans in the early twentieth century was sort of like Athens around 450 B.C., in the sense that a new technology (sound recording) was enabling a new type of person (musically illiterate) to become really really influential.

I'm a Big Fan, Charlie Brown

Reading Cynthia Selfe's chapter on visual literacy made me think of Scott McCloud. In high school I read his Understanding Comics, largely because I was a comic book nerd. It is probably the best of the very few books written about how comics work as a medium. It's like a theoretical approach to comics.

It reminded me also of the moral panic surrounding comics in the middle of the twentieth century, a topic we discussed briefly. It would seem that the comics moral panic, as well as the hierarchy of literary taste that has always dismissed the "funnies," has clouded Selfe's perspective with regard to visual literacy. She thinks that "image-capturing software, multimedia texts, and the World Wide Web" are the only genres, or literacies or venues, that could potentially impact our approach to composition.

Why then have "new media texts" been so effective in shaking up the world of composition while "old media" such as comics have had little impact? I suspect the answer lies in the ubiquity of technology, particularly among the economic elite. As Selfe puts it, "Global communications . . . exchanged via increasingly complicated computer networks . . . increasingly involve texts that depend heavily, even primarily, on visual elements." It's more difficult to argue that there's a practical value to encouraging facility in the grammar of comics in a culture that continues to disdain the form.

But comics are universal. Consider the airplane safety cards or pamphlets we've all seen. On some level, we rely on visual literacy all the time. (The image below and others like it can be found here.)

Consider also McCloud's follow-up to Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics. In that book he makes the connection between comics and the Web, arguing that the future of comics is on the Web and that to an extent, the Web is comics. It occurs to me that a composition classroom would greatly benefit from a few chapters from one of McCloud's books. Just look at how cool this crusty old Web comics essay from 2000 is. Some of the ideas are no longer relevant, such as the concerns about scrolling and bandwidth, but McCloud's contribution to the broader discussion about the Web is really interesting.

It's not that Selfe is anti-comics exactly. She's striving valiantly to expand the palette of the composition classroom along visual lines. It's just that she ought to read Scott McCloud. Her vocabulary--"composer/designer," "reader/viewer," and so forth--seems so stiff by comparison. Why not just say "comics." And then say, "Comics probably provide the best, easiest, most intuitive, and most fun way to show how words and pictures can be combined in a way that tells a story or makes an argument." And then you could also say, "Gee, the Web is kind of like that. And kind of not. Discuss."