Tuesday, November 28, 2006

What's an upside-down-guitar player doing at The New York Times? What he's doing is "multimedia" in a story titled String Theory: Accousticians Who Break the Rules of Instrument Design If a "newspaper" story ever called out for an online multimedia treatment, here it is. The ever-versatile New York Times even had a science writer on the job who is a pretty good guitar player, as shown in close-up video. The Flash and video components of the story will be good for today's class discussion. First question: In the "Simulating the Masters" Flash pages, is it as easy to miss the "Simulating the vibration" and "Art over science" sections as I think? The section also could demonstrate the value of clear caption writing, and (this is a cheap shot) shows that there may be no spelling-checker in the software the Times uses to produce its Flash. (There's a reference to "classical intruments" at one point in "Art over science."  Since the presentation is done with Flash, I'm also unable to link directly to the page I'm talking about.) On a less-technical issue, I'm not sure I would have shown reporter Andrew Revkin entering a particular music store and mentioning the name of his own favorite guitar, neither of which were featured in the story. But his appearance is a nice personal touch, and it is very cool to see a left-handed guitarist finger-picking a right-handed guitar so well. Elizabeth Cotten would be proud. So even the reporter is multimedia. (Speaking of guitars, since the story is about acoustically engineering instruments out of new materials, I was surprised the story didn't  mention the Adamas model by the Ovation company, an instrument builder with aircraft-industry roots. It has been making Adamas guitar tops out of a sandwich of carbon fiber and birch since 1976. It started producing fiberglass-backed guitars ten years before that. If I have time between classes, maybe I'll write and ask Andrew about that.) 2:04:36 PM    comment []

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