I feel like it has been SO INCREDIBLY LONG since the last time I posted a weekly summary!  The past three weeks have been full of audio assignments with a few visual and writing ones scattered about in the TDC arena.

Let’s kick off with the audio assignments, shall we?

In addition to each creating our own radio bumper and radio commercial for our radio shows, we were required to complete five stars worth of activities from the Audio Assignments section on the DS106 site.

I chose to make some wind with my mouth (and teeth, for whistling), to recite a lovely Craigslist Ad as poetry, and to write a story using as many homophones as possible.

You can listen to all three of those here:

The Craigslist ad came from here and was about this tree:

The wind was the most challenging of the three for me, but mostly because it took me forever to come up with an idea for what kind of weather to imitate.  Writing a homophone-full story was also kind of difficult because I did try really hard to not write about animals but ended up doing so anyway.

Aside from those audio assignments, I also put together a commercial and a bumper for the Dot Commers radio show on DS106 radio.  The commercial was far more difficult than the bumper, but both challenged my audio-editing skills.  I learned how to cut individual recordings into pieces, as opposed to recording several separate audio clips, and I also had to up my creativity level for both assignments.  In the case of the commercial, I tried to remember radio commercials I’d heard before and could only think of those tacky infomercials for weight loss products where the people always sound way too excited when they’re talking to each other and say the product name too many times.  I decided to go with the theme of our show though and advertised for a product to help with teamwork.  For the bumper, I did the same thing and what came to mind was the radio call-ins where people rave about how much they love a particular show or station; I created one for the Dot Commers.

Here are both of those clips:

And finally, the foley sounds:

This was by far the hardest challenge EVER for me so far in the course.  You can read more about why here, but I certainly hope we aren’t doing this again any time soon…

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The Daily Creates for this week had less to do with Audio than the rest of the week.  In fact, I didn’t do any audio daily creates (because we had SO MANY THROUGHOUT THE REST OF THE THREE WEEKS.  You can read about them here.  They were fun though, and my favorite was getting to revisit my obsession with song lyrics!

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Group Project:

Working with the group was a lot of fun.  I think all of us kind of were focusing on finishing up work before break the first week, but I posted an idea on Twitter and then we all tweeted back and forth about what other ideas we had and which we liked best.  Before break  we did make sure to meet up in a chat room online to discuss our options, and during that meeting we chose to go a totally different route from our original topic, which was social justice.  My idea behind that had been a sort of ‘pick a topic, read a bit, discuss, ask questions, etc.’  but I think that ended up being a little more than any of us had time to put in.  We decided to do a radio drama instead and chose to make a skit about all the things that go wrong with group projects, sort of parodying the assignment itself (that idea goes to Tim).

The hardest part about working as a group was finding time when we were all free.  Aside from that, we all got along really well and had no trouble working together at all, adding to the irony of the skit.  Coming up with the lines for the skit was maybe the easiest part, because we all had our own assigned ‘type’ of character and so we built off of each other and created a conversation that way.

I think for the most part we all contributed to all the same things (except for Karissa volunteering to put the final result together on her computer), but I did take charge a little more in just making sure we had scheduled meetings.  Playing along with a skit and “acting,” even if it was online, was a bit out of my comfort zone – I’m very self-conscious and have never acted in any way in anything before, so it was an uncomfortable thing for me.  I think it went pretty well, overall.

I’m not sure how well exactly the show will go over on the air.  I feel like for us, it was entertaining and interesting, but we are also the ones who came up with it and created it, so we have an idea of what’s going on the entire time, whereas the audio doesn’t necessarily have that.  We tried to make it very obvious both at the beginning and the end (kind of bluntly) and also during the ‘meat’ of it all (by staying in character) though, and our commercials also help get at the point we were trying to make.  Hopefully people get it!

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I feel like my skills with audio definitely improved this week.  Listening to the other work I’ve done on Audacity earlier in the semester and comparing it to what I did this week, I can definitely hear a difference and I also challenged myself more when creating the recordings.

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Coffee, Dogs, and Activism:

I tried really hard to find the source for the above image, guys. The closest I could come though was finding this photoblog, which was the original source for two other images (1 & 2) that appear to have come from the same photoshoot.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

And in other news, the high-school boys who repeatedly sexually assaulted/molested a drunk and mostly unconscious girl and took video and picture footage of themselves doing are attempting to get off the hook by stating that the girl never “affirmatively said no.”  Oh, and also a U.S. Air Force general dismissed a rape conviction against a Lt. Colonel, the mandates of which ordered the imprisonment and dismissal from the Air Force of the Lt. Colenel.

Update: both boys in Ohio were found guilty.

Maybe one of these weeks there won’t be something ridiculously disgusting for me to talk about and I can post something cheerful.