Audacity ideas for Visual Arts

My education and technology friend Bianca is looking for ideas on how to use Audacity in different subject areas. I have not used it before but wanted to respond so I could come up with ideas for my own practice. Even though my ideas were quite simple, I found that to leave my response purely as a response to Bianca's blog and to not take my own ideas further would be a shame. So, I thought I would post my response here so that I might look to the future and implement these tools in my own classroom...

Hi Bianca!

I am sorry I did not get in on time for your last post but I too would be really interested in learning about audacity.

I have not used audacity myself for Visual Arts yet, however a fairly obvious use for this tool in the subject would be for students to describe an artwork to an audience. A lot of museums use podcasts to teach people about artworks however, to get students to use this approach would help them to develop how they analyse, talk about, discuss an artwork from different points of view.

Students often find describing art works in an in-depth manner difficult and to get them to publish their description in this manner would give them practice and accountability.

They could also post an image of their own artwork and use audacity to publish a description of their own artist practise – describing their work, why they did it, how they did it, what it means, etc.

Students could also be told about access in museums for those with disabilities which is a really important focus for museums these days. Students could be asked to use audacity to provide access to an artwork for blind audiences – how might they describe the work so that blind audiences have the best access possible. Students could be told how their recordings could be combined with having the actual sculpture/painting, etc. present in the gallery for touch and feel so that blind audiences get to know the work through other senses than sight.

I hope this helps. Maybe I will look at implementing my own suggestions this term!

Sal
x

See MoMA for an example of Podcasts about arworks.