Week 3—Multimodality

In the multimodal world of digital writing, digital images are but one of the modes available when it comes to storytelling. According to The New London Group (License, 2020), in total there a five modes and they are: Visual, Linguistic, Aural, Spatial, and Gestural, see MULTIMODAL image below.

Kristen Arola, Jennifer Shepherd, and Cheryl Ball, Writer/Designer, 4

However the term ‘mode’ incites other thoughts in my mind, but it turns out that they might be indirectly interconnected. The mode called Visual relies on what a person sees through their eyes. And it seems that this same mode can also be found in image editing software programs that are used to change to appearance of an image. The world of beauty modeling is a prime example of photo enhancement. And, believe it or not, many photos of models are ‘air-brushed’ in the post processing, pre-publication phase; that’s why you never see pimples on a magazine model’s face.

The software builder, Adobe, have a photo editing program called Photoshop (Adobe, 2020). This program uses a Mode as one of its tools that a user can employ and put to good use. The ‘mode’ tool, for example, is used to set the colour properties of an image. This is where a colour image can be scaled down to grayscale (sic), also known as black and white. As powerful as Photoshop is, though, it is not a simple process to add colour to an existing grayscale image. That doesn’t mean it cannot be done, but the first step would be to set the image’s mode properties to one of the colour options, see image below.

Image of the menu bar where Mode resides in Adobe Photoshop CS6

Although I am not a photographic professional, Photoshop is my personal choice when it comes to an image editing program. It is, therefore, the program I have used for my remediation project. This program will help me get the most out of the photographic images when it comes to remediating in the Visual mode. Below is an example of one to images I chose to use in my project. In this example the original is on the left, while the edited image on the right has a lot of the colour removed except for a small area that is a focus-item used in my original narrative.

Original image (left) titled horse-2719630_1280.jpg was sourced from the Pixabay. All content on Pixabay can be used for free for commercial and non-commercial use. https://pixabay.com/service/license/

Incidentally, if anyone wants a photo editing program but doesn’t want to spend money, an alternative to Photoshop is a wonderful ‘little’ program called IrfanView (I put an emphasis on ‘little’ because the download file is around 3MB!). This program is available free of charge for private, non-commercial use; and although it is not as powerful as Photoshop, it does have many of the features needed for basic photo manipulation. You can get IrfanView from here: https://www.irfanview.com/

The next mode I will attempt to elucidate on is the Aural mode. This mode refers to sound, and relates to the things that we hear. At this point it might also be pertinent to mention that combining modes is part of the multimodal spectrum. Sounds in the aural mode can be linked together with other modes. Video is a good example of the blending of modes because it ties the visual mode together with other modes. But when I think of sounds that have modes, I am associating with the modes of music.

It doesn’t take a concert virtuoso to understand what a scale in musical term means. Many of us get introduced to music from an early age at school. From the onset we are told about scales and generally it is the C major scale that learn. What they don’t explain in fundamental theory, however, is that the every scale is made of up modes.

To go one step further, the term ‘scale’ is actually incorrect, but it is easier to call it a scale than to call it a mode. In fact the correct term for any major scale is to call it the Ionian mode and is in fact a combination of triads or '3rds' that form either a major or minor scale/mode. 

But how do musical modes tie in with the Aural modal mode?

If a person is writing a digital story using a combination of modes they might like to consider music to help drive their story. Steven Spielberg is considered a master of motion picture direction. Even if you have never seen the movie Jaws, you have probably quite likely heard some form of the orchestral accompaniment that drives home an unnerving moment in the movie that is about to take place such as a large man eating shark about to make an appearance. Below is a short sound clip at around 18 seconds that was taken from a 3 minute YouTube video of the Boston Pops performing John Williams, Theme from Jaws.

 

Jaws Theme (runtime 18 seconds) ~ To Listen ~ Press Play

John Williams: Theme from Jaws (Boston Pops) https://youtu.be/E-sX2Y0W8l0

Creating and adding music to a digital story might not be for everyone but it is something that I have a personal interest in. That being said and rather than adding a link to all the relevant theory, instead I thought I’d just share a personal video I recorded earlier. This one is for all the lady writers in our group.

Works Cited

Adobe. (2020). Products/Photoshop. Retrieved from Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/au/products/photoshop.html

License, C. C.-S. (2020, March 10). Multiliteracy. Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiliteracy#The_New_London_Group