Audience / Purpose
This music history timeline is intended for college-aged students who hold a curiosity for music, technology, vintage objects, and sustainability. The audience I am aiming to capture with this interactive project is a younger generation that has an interest in learning about music technology history. The purpose of using a timeline is to inform the audience of the diverse and varying formats that music has gone through over the course of history. Through learning the interesting and unique history of music formats, I hope to persuade the audience to have an interest in vintage music technology, as well as persuade them to hopefully dedicate time and even money to preserving old music technology for the sake of reducing e-waste.
Images
I chose a timeline to convey my message of music technology sustainability because I believe showing the passage of time can communicate how rapidly some technologies enter and exit the mainstream. Additionally, I thought a timeline with summaries of each technology would be effective at grabbing the attention of a reader as well as provoking their interest through brief descriptions of how the technology works or its cultural significance. Furthermore, I thought a timeline was best for telling the story of how each format succeeded the next as well as including the narrative that there is room for all of these technologies to make comebacks as some of them have already before. Overall, the interactivity of the timeline allows users to control which piece of technology they want to learn about, as well as directly see the progression and the amount of time between each music format. Furthermore, including images with each timeline slide allowed me to use visuals I felt would resonate with my target audience of the younger-age college generation. For example, I think the "Turntable ASMR" youtube video I included not only supplies a visual aid for the object I am describing, but it also does so in a way that connects with my audience since ASMR videos are popular among my generation. Lastly, I think including the last slide about how analog music has made somewhat of a recent comeback also conveys to my audience that our generation is of those who have started to cause a revival of old music formats and technologies. I think this could help persuade those in my target audience that preserving and purchasing vintage music formats is not only sustainable but also trendy and stylish.
Process
To create this project I used the interactive timeline program to provide a brief history of music formats while also attempting to provide a slight narrative and persuade my target audience to preserve this technology. The narrative I tried to weave into the slides was the idea of technological progress and revival, as I wanted to show how things lead to one another while also showing that these formats faded in and out of relevancy. I started by narrowing down what technologies to include in the brief list. I decided that I only wanted to include technologies that my generation would be familiar with one way or another or technologies that are still relevant in a modern context. This narrowed the list down, so from there I needed to decide what information I wanted to include in the brief slide description. I decided I wanted to cover the technology's origin, how it worked, how it built upon the previous technology, its cultural relevance, and what it lead to. I wanted to include the technology's origin and how it functioned to inform and maybe hook the reader into learning more. I also wanted to include the cultural relevance of each technology and how it lead to other technology to build the narrative that these formats are unique and historically significant, as well as build the narrative that these technologies are still viable and relevant. When constructing the images I wanted to include things such as GIFs and YouTube videos because I think these visual aids can show in a detailed way how dynamic and different these technologies were. I also think the clips and images I showed resonate with my target audience as the old "YouTube" logo and the GIF of the iPod can generate nostalgia in those ages similar to me who grew up in this era of music technology.
Learning
From working on this project, I learned that interactive media can be an effective way to tell a story, as well as persuade and inform an audience. I guess I had never realized that interactive media can be just as effective at persuasion as written words and videos can be. To some extent, an interactive timeline can be even more effective, as the interaction generates a unique experience for the user. This project also taught me that a cohesive message takes time and effort to build and cannot always be visible right away. Unlike the programs Illustrator and Photoshop, when editing the timeline I was not always able to see the changes I made right away. Working off the Excel sheet presented challenges since I couldn't always see how an image or paragraph would fit in the timeline, but it taught me to be more concise and also taught me to visualize and try to think ahead when building my message.