Aux Replays

Early Experiences in a Digital Era      I was a very curious boy when it came to emerging technology such as the internet, video games, online movies, music and content as well as cellular phones. I grew up very much in the cutting edge of the digital age, so it was always something I encountered and naturally grew accustomed to the 2000's. However, growing up with that huge resource came with a lot of challenges, and responsibility. While I faced a lot of these challenges, I was not always alone, I had the help of my mother who had a large hand in informing me of the responsibilities of using this digital resource.       One of my first failures and lessons was accidentally purchasing games on my mother's cell phone without my knowledge that it was charging her real life bank account. Seemingly a novel mistake, affected my mother's responsibility of providing for her son's needs, and left her temporarily struggling financially to put food on the table by herself.     

Reluctance to Social Media This blog posting is going to be a little different since it was late. This past weekend I had a grueling family event that required all of my focus, and I apologize for the inconvenience but I think I still have a lot to share on the this week's topic, the community of practice model. It's interesting to think about how the community of practice model has evolved over time, and how I hope it will continue to evolve in the future.  My profession has always been in audio since I was a pre-teen and so I try to access that community in many different ways, and it usually never requires me to be communicating with professionals in person - like ever. I will touch more on this later, but the point is that I always try to exercise this model without having to interact with platforms like Twitter or Instagram, just because I always thought they were never really effective in sharing how complex audio can be, and being limited to what I can provide to around

  Prior Experiences/ Aha Moment So this week in ITEC was all about digital story telling and story boarding. I just wanted to talk about my thoughts about story telling in general and how this lead into my story boarding project for a short video. I've had some fun experiences with story telling, I was always enthralled with stories as a kid. There's so many ways I consume story telling whether it's through movies like Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, video games like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (super excited for this one!) and books. As a kid, I loved bed time stories, I was obsessed with super heroes, definitely with Spider-Man, and I loved comic books. It's amusing to me the idea that I am credited on a graphic novel that you could actually still buy on the kindle store, a comic issue I made in middle school with my art class and my instructor then published it. Such a cool experience.  I tried thinking of other ways I consume or create stories. Then I fina

Introduction An otherwise complex audio signal chain My name is Jake Swensen, this is my first blog post and I think it is important for me to give this introduction, and explain a little bit about the title of this blog "Aux Replays". A considerable part of my identity is that I produce a lot of music, I have studied audio engineering, exploring sonic quality and creativity for over a decade. Usually producers need "stage" names, I go by Aux, personally it resonates with me. My middle name is Austin - hence the 'Au' portion of the name. The last part is the 'X' which is the roman numeral for my life path number, 10. Aux is also sort of a nerdy audio term, usually dealing with signal flow. "Replays" is just a fun replacement for the word "reflects". I hope you find this blog insightful. I hope I can use this blog to develop some literacy in this medium, as well as leaving a positive digital footprint. This blog will also be a way