Living in a Social Media Age

I think I began using the internet for the first time when I was in 9th grade. I had just discovered the joys of email. It was really wonderful! I could send a message to my friends and they would get it within minutes. And then there was instant messenger. I could have a written conversation in real time over the internet.

Then when I was in college, a professor introduced me to Google "What's a Google?" I had asked. Then before you knew it I was using Google on a daily basis to access information on the web.

Now, years later, social media has become the way of life. Are you on Facebook or LinkedIn? Or do you tweet on twitter? Or do you have a channel on YouTube?

When did I start using social media? Well, it all began when I had adopted my two parrots. Before I had adopted them, I found myself researching on the internet using Google. I had come across some sites that had parrot discussion forums. I had joined one of these forums and connected with many parrot owners who welcomed my stories about my feathered companions and who enjoyed watching their latest videos. I still belong to a couple of parrot discussion forums today.

Many opportunities have come to me as a result of social media. As a musician, I have had the opportunities to showcase my work. I have posted recordings of my performances on the web so that people can listen to them. When I have information and ideas to send out to the public, social media allows me to share it in matter of minutes to many people without the cost of postage!

So why do I use social media? The answer is quite simple. I have something to say and want people to know about it. Like many others, I have a voice that wants to be heard. I am looking for opportunities through networking and want to know the latest information about subjects in which I am interested. It is amazing what you can accomplish through social media. I have found information about the latest assistive technologies for both hearing and vision loss, I reconnected with my relatives who live in Italy, my music is on the web, and I found great products and services as well.

The online community gives you a broader audience of people who will listen to what you have to say. Maybe you are a great writer, artist, musician, business owner or a person who has a brilliant idea. Whatever the case may be, social media allows you to reach more people than word of mouth.

It is amazing what you have available to you with just a click of a mouse. Don't take it for granted. Use it and be thankful that you possess such power to make a difference and inspire. Even if it you make a difference in one person's life, that is a great achievement.

Just to show you that we are truly living in the social media age, here is the latest version of The Social Media Revolution by Erik Qualman. You can visit his blog called Socialnomics at www.socialnomics.net.

WebCapTel

Do you or someone you know have difficulty hearing on the telephone? Well, I am one of those people and have found something very helpful called WebCapTel. WebCapTel is a web-based telephone relay service that is free.

What is Captel?

The Captel is a captioned telephone. It looks like a regular phone but there is a screen embedded on the base which displays captions of the current conversation. This telephone is ideal for anyone who has a hearing loss and find it challenging to hear on the telephone When the user makes a call, another call is made to a captioning relay service. The captions are created by the use of voice recognition software. A captionist listens to and repeats what is said by the person on the other end of the line. There are a couple different Captel phones to choose from. Some connect with a traditional telephone landline while others can connect with digital cables or VoIP telephone lines. To find out more about their captioned telephones visit www.captel.com.

What is WebCapTel?

WebCapTel allows a user to talk on any telephone while viewing the captions online. The service is free and is available through Hamalton Captel and Sprint Captel. No special phones required, just a computer with an internet connection. Simply create a free account with either of these companies, log on, type the phone number from which you are calling, type telephone number of the person you wish to call and then click place call. The captioning service will call your phone and then immediately connect you with the number you are calling. Once the telephone conversation begins, you can listen to the person on the end while seeing what they are saying on your computer screen. You can adjust the font and colors on the screen for easy viewing, too. It is a great service and best of all it is free.

Note: if someone wants to call you, they first have to dial the captioning service at 1-800-933-7219t and then dial your number. You also must be logged into your account.

How WebCapTel Helps Me

I don't have a landline or VoIP telephone. As of now, I only place calls on my cell phone. I do not use WebCapTel all the time but I find it very helpful in certain situations. For example, if I need to made a call and I don't know the person on the other end to well. Sometimes I will use Web Captel when I am making a phone call to someone that I have never spoken to before. You just never know if you will be able to hear the person on the other line too well. A lot of times, you get soft talkers or people who just don't speak at a volume that I am used to. Most of the people I know very well, tend to speak at a reasonable volume on the phone or don't mind too much when I ask them to repeat themselves.

I am glad I know about WebCaptel. You can call from any type of telephone.  I don't need a special kind of telephone to make and receive calls.  I can use my cell phone.  As long as I have my computer and my internet is up and running, I am good to go. It is such a helpful service and I am so happy that it is free!

The Benefits of Using an FM System

I thought that I would write this article to raise some awareness.about FM Systems. Many people do not know what an FM system is and wouldn't even recognize one. In fact, I have been asked if it is some type of recording device. This is pretty normal because you don't really hear the topic of FM systems com up on everyday conversation.

While I was at handbell choir rehearsal (I am in my church's handbell choir), some of the members were wondering what our music director, Nadia, was wearing around her neck and what it does. Nadia directed the question to me to answer since it was my listening device that she was wearing. "Nadia is wearing a microphone around her neck so that I can hear her when she talks. You see, when she speaks, the sound of her voice goes directly to my hearing aids." I said while pointing to one of my hearing aids. One of the members was very impressed with this type of technology.

The is what an FM system is on a very basic level. An FM system consists of two components: a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter is what Nadia wears around her neck. It has a microphone which picks up her voice as she speaks. The sounds of her voice travel wirelessly to two receivers which are attached to each of my hearing aids. Some receivers easily snap on a hearing aid for easy application and removal. However, my receivers are permanently attached to my hearing aids and are located where the battery door is. When I am not using my FM system the receivers are powered off and I am just listening to sounds through the hearing aid mics alone. I am literally like a human radio because an FM system operates the same way as a radio, using frequency modulation (FM) waves.

This is my FM transmitter. You can't see it, but the microphone is on the upper left hand side

Here is what my receiver looks like. It is attached to my hearing aid.

FM transmitters come in many varieties. There are some that work with a person's hearing aids. This is how mine works. Both my hearing aids and FM system are made by Phonak and are compatible with one another. There are some FM systems that work independently. That is, you don't need to wear a hearing aid to use it. The person receiving the sounds would wear a headset.

Why is an FM system so beneficial? For starters, it allows a person to hear at far distances and in noisy situations. Let's use handbell choir as an example. Rehearsals are held inside a church, so there is the added echo when hearing someone speak. Plus, the music director stands at least two feet away from me. For some that may seem like not much, but when you are in a church and have a hearing loss, that can be quite a distance.

As Nadia talks, I can hear her as if she were standing a few inches away from me. My receivers pick up her speech and the microphones on my hearing aids pick up the other sounds around me like the sounds of our music making. If someone next to me says something to me, I can hear that, too, but no matter how noisy it gets around me, I can always hear Nadia's instructions.

Another benefit of having an FM system is that It can plug the transmitter into audio devices via an aux cable. You simply plug one end of the cable into the FM transmitter and the other end into a headphone jack of your audio source. I often have a hard time hearing the television so I sometimes hook my FM transmitter up to it for easier listening. If I am watching television with other people in the room, I just turn the transmitter on, and place it near the speaker of the television so that the microphone pics up and amplifies all the sounds. Now I can enjoy watching television with other people.

An FM system is very helpful in situations where I feel that I need a "third ear". I have used it in noisy settings, music rehearsals, listening to far away sounds and more.

Has Technology Taken Over the World?

How many times have you called a company or organization and instead of hearing a person answer the telephone, you are greeted with a recording. The recording will go something like this: Thank you for calling blah blah blah, for directions press 1, for office hours press 2, etc. A lot of times it takes several minutes until you are connected with the department or person you are looking for.

Technology does do a great job of making life easier but is  it taking the place of people? That is, before we had these recorded voice greetings, a real person actually answered the phone and assisted you. We are currently in a deep recession, where thousands of Americans are out of work. Why couldn't a person be hired to answer and direct calls rather than a machine? The fact is, you don't need to hire a machine to do work for you. It doesn't require a work salary. Machines are free labor. 

Do you ever imagine what life will be like in say 50 years? Will we be replaced by robots? At the rate we are going, I sometimes wonder.

One time, I was at the train station and was amazed to see that there was actually a ticket vendor. I had always purchased my train tickets from a machine, never a person. I have to tell you that this was a real treat. A person spoke with me and helped me purchase my ticket. I wasn't putting my money inside a machine and following the directions on a computer screen. Nope, a person was helping me and when I finished my transaction I said, "Thank you" and he said, "You're welcome."

We have gotten so comfortable with living with electronic communication. Let's look at all the ways that we can "talk" to a person. We can chat online, we can email, we can text, we can call using either a landline phone or a cell phone, and we can use skype video calling. We have so many ways that we can communicate with people and yet as human beings we still don't even know how to communicate.

People are just always in a hurry to get ahead and get things done. To talk to a person sitting next to them is a little uncomfortable. It is weird. The furthest that I have gotten in an average conversation with a stranger was "how are you?" I am not saying that we should go up to people and tell all our life stories, but I find it interesting that we as a species are the least social. Parrots, for example, live in flocks, and are in constant communication with each other throughout the day. We, as human beings, have become so independent and so wrapped up in ourselves that we forget about everyone else around us.

Technology is great but too much can be bad for you. The last time I was riding the train, I saw people on their cell phones and people working on their laptops. I usually like to sit and enjoy the ride. I remember riding the train as a kid and the only thing I would see people doing was maybe reading a newspaper or a book. Times have definitely changed. People don't seem to stop and smell the roses anymore.

The next time you are out and about, take some time to look at the world around you and to maybe say hello to a few people. As wonderful as technology is, it doesn't have as much magic as the natural world. When I am waiting for a train or bus, I love to look at the scenery. It makes me feel alive. Enjoy your wonderful gadgets, but don't forget about the people and other wonderful things that exist in this world.

 

 

 

Is the Internet Good or Evil?

We have all heard a story like this: A person connects with another person via some website. When they meet in person, someone winds up either assaulted or dead. After hearing a story like this on the news one day, someone close to me commented: "I don't like that internet. It the root of all evil." To me, this statement was a little strong. In response to her comment I stated: "The internet doesn't hurt people. People hurt people."

The internet is nor good nor evil. It simply just is. It is how we use it that determines whether it is beneficial or not. In the real world, there are people who do good and people who don't. You will find them anywhere you go. People use the internet so it is not any different. The disadvantage of the internet is that no one can see you, so it is much easier to conceal your identity.

In my opinion, the internet is a very useful tool for accessing information. Honestly, I find more answers on Google than I do from most books. I use Google religiously when I am trying to access the latest information on just about any subject.

Before I adopted my two parrots, I spent a year learning as much as I could about how to care for a parrot and the characteristics of the different species.. I accessed different websites and web forums that provided me with all the information I needed. I learned a lot and I am grateful that I could access all this information with just a click of a mouse.

The internet is a great way to send and receive information in seconds rather than days. You can publish ideas, pictures, music and videos on the internet. In addition, the internet can be a great networking tool and a great place to connect with people who share the same interests as you do. For example I belong to two parrot forums and it is nice to be a part of an online community who loves parrots and living with them as much as I do.

I receive great help, advice and information from online forums as well. Just the other day I had a question regarding my Phonak FM system. For those of you who don't know, an FM system is an assistive listening device that allows a person to hear sounds from far away or in a noisy environment. I don't know anyone close to me who uses one so I joined a Hearing Loss Forum that I found online. Many of the members there answered many of my questions about my FM system. Their answers were not only based on knowledge but their personal experiences of having used one. One member of the forum uses the exact same FM system as I do.

To say that the internet is the root of all evil is far from an accurate statement. It is not about if the internet is good or bad. It is about how we use it, and that is what makes all the difference.

When Creativity Meets Technology

There is more to a sound than what is just simply heard by the ear at the moment the sound is produced. Each sound contains endless possibilities of new sounds being born. Thanks to advances in technology and recording, one has the power to manipulate any given sound and turn it into something different.

These types of experiment with sounds resulted what is called musique concrète (Fr. Concrete Music), which is made up of natural sounds and sound effects that are recorded and then manipulated electronically. One project that uses this technique is Squawk Rock. Here is a recording of it on YouTube accompanied by video footage of my two parrots, Sunny and Nikki. The sounds in this recording are all based on Sunny and Nikki's vocalizations.

The Making of Squawk Rock

Squawk Rock was born in the spring of 2008 while I was finishing up my last semester of graduate studies. During that semester, I was taking an electro- acoustic music course. We were studying musique concrète. One of our assignments was to create a piece based on pre-recorded sounds. Most of my peers created a work based on an existing composition, manipulating and cutting up the sounds to make it sound completely different. I, however, started fresh and turned to my biggest musical inspirations; my two companion parrots, Sunny and Nikki.

Before I began work on my project, I needed to collect some of their sounds. I found myself following them around with a digital tape recorder, collecting as many different sounds as possible. I used an Olympus Digital Voice Recorder, which I had purchased at Radio Shack a few years before. It has two microphones that are built in which create stereo sounds. The sounds I recorded included squawks, light chirps and speech. The girls seemed to welcome the attention and the opportunity to be a subject of my work.

Once I collected all the bird sounds that I needed, I uploaded them onto my PC so that I could bring them into my music editing software program called Audacity. I took each sound and transformed it into as many different sounds as possible. I also, cut out both the attack and decay of much of the bird sounds, thus only taking the middle portion or durational component of the sound itself. This definitely disguised the sound since only a portion of the sound was being used rather than the entire sound itself. This kind of cutting, however, was not done to the sounds that included speech.

First I started with each of their squawks. From each of their squawks I was able to create several different variations by altering the pitch, duration, and timbre. One of the new plugins that I had downloaded for Audacity was a ring modulator called Killerringer, which I found to be very effective in changing the entire color and character of Sunny's squawk. After I made as many alterations I could on each of their squawks, I moved to their speech and other recorded parrot sounds.

Soon my file folder was packed with bird sound samples that were going to be used for the actual composition itself. I started a new project in Audacity and imported some of the samples. I took one sound and cut and paste it repeatedly at different time intervals to create a kind of rhythmic pattern. I placed the squawks on different sides of the stereo channel to create a nice stereo effect. This rhythmic pattern can be heard in the middle of the work. The bass and cymbal-like sounds heard at the beginning derived from squawks as well. The cymbal sound was created by putting Sunny's squawk through a ring modulator. The pitch of her squawk was altered so it would sound lower. Also, I used a phaser to give it a swoosh affect. I cut and paste both the cymbal-like sound and the bass sound in such a way that they would be reminiscent of bass drum and cymbal heard in a rock band.

The speech was edited so it would be heard in reverse and in a lower pitch. This is heard after the entrance of the rhythmic pattern. Most of the speech used here is Nikki's since she is the better talker of the two parrots. The spoken phrases that were edited include "hello" and "Nikki is a pretty bird".

The process involved much editing and trial and error to see what worked. The most difficult part of the project was getting all the sounds to happen at the exact time I wanted them to happen. However, I believe this work achieves its overall goal. The goal was to turn the bird sounds into a new kind of music, particularly rock, and to show that one type of sound can bring about many new sounds.

My classmates loved hearing the track when I presented it in class. However, it was a bigger hit in the bird community. I posted the recording on one of the community bird forums of which I belong and they went wild and totally loved the concept. What are you thoughts. P.S. the best comment I got was from my mother. She said: "You are wasting good tape." That cracked me up!

The Joys of Using ZoomText

Nowadays, computers have become the way of life. Most people use them to type documents, store and view media and surf the internet. But what happens when you have difficulty seeing what is on your computer screen? There are a lot of people who have varying degrees of vision loss in which screen magnification can be a tremendous help.


ZoomText is a screen magnification program for Microsoft Windows that was developed by the company, Ai Squared. There are two versions of Zoomtext: ZoomText Magnifier and ZoomText Magnifier/Reader, which includes a built-in screen reader. With ZoomText, an individual who is visually impaired can enlarge and enhance everything on their computer screen. The screen reader allows the user to hear what is being displayed on the screen. They can even have the computer read to them as they type.

I use ZoomText Magnifier 9.1 which doesn't include the screen reader. Because I am hearing impaired, I didn't opt for the Magnifier/Screen Reader because I have difficulty understanding synthesized speech.


To get a feel for how ZoomText works, here is a great video demonstration.

Before I used ZoomText, I would have to lean forward and move my face close to the computer screen to be able to read what was there. This resulted in back pain, neck pain and tired eyes. ZoomText has made my life easier because I can use the computer more comfortably and don't have to get into awkward positions to see what is on the computer screen. My only regret is that I didn't purchase the software sooner.

The most convenient feature of ZoomText is that I can save my enhancement settings. Therefore, every time I load the program, I don't have to make all the adjustments. I love the pointer and cursor enhancements as well. They are really great.


I also find the keyboard shortcuts to be convenient. This saves me time because if I want to make any adjustments, I don't have to bring up the ZoomText interface. For example, I normally have my screen magnification set to 2.5X, however if I want to increase or decrease the magnification power, I simply hold down the control key while spinning the wheel on the mouse: up to increase magnification and down to decrease. There are other keyboard shortcuts but I won't get into that. There are too many to name, and I don't know every single one of them by heart.

Now what if you are an individual who is not visually impaired but could use a slight magnification boost on your PC? I have heard a lot of people say that they lean forward and squint to see the fine print on the screen. Sometimes websites have print that is very light, making it more of a strain on the eyes.


In this particular case, ZoomText Express would be a better choice. It's affordable and gives you some basic screen enhancements to help you read the content on your computer screen with more comfort and ease.

Here is a video introducing ZoomText Express.