For the visual mini-project assignment, I chose to express the lyrics of a song in terms of emoji texts. I chose the song “Don’t Stop Believin'” from Journey for the purposes of this project. When introduced to the idea of being able to transform song lyrics into emojis, this specific song sparked right to me due to its ability of creating a visualizing effect in the listener’s mind. The song entails the story of a boy who wants to pursue his dreams of becoming a singer in Hollywood. The boy’s father gives him the encouragement to go to Hollywood and pursue his dream. Once the boy reaches Hollywood, he meets someone who expresses to him that everyone looking to become an actor or or anything all stand on Sunset Boulevard on Friday nights as street artists. He reflects back on his experience of living in Detroit, always dreaming about going to Los Angeles. In a hotel in Detroit, he could never sleep due to this curiosity of his. He would stare out the window all night, looking at down-facing street lights and homeless people walking from pitch dark to under the light to sleep. That is where he established the “streetlight people” – a motion to show how for the homeless that was their emotion, sitting under the light and hoping someone would see them. I specifically chose this song because it expresses the journey of a couple who are from two different backgrounds with a goal of making it into the industry. The song lyrics and presentation allow the listeners to create an imagine in their head, as the song played, I was able to picture the boy and girl taking the train (being lonely), people sitting under the street poles, and seeing the boy and girl’s first meeting on the train. I chose to create this project using my iPhone’s notes app. The application allows me to enter text and see the corresponding emoji that Apple has predefined for it. If I agreed with the emoji, I would choose it. If I did not see the emoji fit for the context, I would scroll through all the emojis in the Apple keyboard to see which one suit the context the best. For lyrics involving “on and on and on”, there was no direct way to express the gesture, I found it fitting to use the emoji involving a person continuously just talking, referring to how we sometimes feel when people talk endlessly without letting other pitch in. Similarly, for the lyric involving “born and raised in…”, there was no way to express the “raising” of a child – I, however, saw an emoji of a mom cradling her baby in her arms, I deemed it fit to be a reference of raising a child. The translation from text to emoji was very subjective at times, I had to make decisions like the ones mentioned above and choose emojis that I personally best thought fit. Those emojis, however, may not be the same emojis someone else may use to reflect the specific textual section of the song. As a result, not everyone may be able to read my emoji translation to the intended meaning I instinctively created it to be. In the reading, “NCTE Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies”, the NCTE Executive Committee expresses how “Certain conventions of design are more effective than others for visual, aural, or multimodal texts. English/Language Arts teachers will need to become more informed about these conventions because they will influence the rhetorical and aesthetic impact of all multimodal texts.” This is very much true for today’s generation and future ahead, with the advent of text being slanged and converted into pictorial modes, there stands a huge issue of how the readers perceive the message on the other hand. Every person analyzes the different media platforms differently, ultimately gaining a different understanding. In my case transforming text to emoji, I only used the emoji to my best understanding – there may have been another emoji to better express what the actual context of the lyric was, however I did not see it or perceive it in that manner. Going forward, there definitely needs to be an emphasize on various media outlets (visual, audio, etc) and educational standards should be established such a uniform media understanding is taught to students – this will aid in people starting to understand how better to perceive media rather than doing it on their instinct.
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