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Fifth Week: Audio Nightmares

Posted by
| February 12, 2016

This week was the most frustrating week so far in Digital Storytelling for me. It was the most frustrating because I couldn’t figure out the Audacity software until late, and I forgot an assignment after it was too late. The assignment that I forgot to do was the Live-Tweet of the DS106 radio, because I figured I would Live-Tweet on Thursday. But I got caught up on Thursday night with studying for my midterm in Marketing that was the next day. Then the next day I realized my mistake and was so angry at myself. Other than those 2 issues I had, the week was pretty good when it came to assignments.

On Monday, I wanted to get some things done. So I quickly came up with an invention for the Daily Create and went to class. After class ended for the day, I wanted to listen to some of the readings from the audio resources page, to hear how audio can affect storytelling and emotions from the listener. I had heard about Orson Wells’ “War of the Worlds” in history class as radio broadcast that had scared many people; but I had never actually listened to what made people so scared. I thought it was ridiculous that you could be scared from just listening to something. So I pulled up the broadcast on Youtube and listened to the whole thing. I realized that the reason people were so scared was because of the broadcast only mentioning it was a dramatization in the 1st few minutes, and it sounded terrifyingly realistic. 

After listening to Orson Wells’ radio broadcast, I played the “Moon Graffiti” in my headphones. It was kind of interesting in my opinion because it told the story about if the NASA launch to the moon had failed. Plus, the fact that it let people know that Nixon had speeches made up just in case it failed. The last thing I liked about it, was that there were many different sound effects that helped captivate the listeners. 

Then after listening to those interesting audio resources, I actually made up a rough draft on my site for the Audio Reflections assignment so that I could post later in the week. At that instant, I opened up my Sketchbook app and started creating my invention for the Daily Create. I created the Home Scanner, also known as the H Scanner which would scan your pantry or fridge and let you know on your phone what kind of foods/drinks were in there. I came up with this idea because after class I’m usually hungry, but I never know what is at home to eat. With this invention, that problem would be gone. Plus, I saw that potentially the H scanner could be used for other purposes like figuring out with CD’s or DVD’s you own. Overall, I think I did a great job of creating the H Scanner using the Sketchbook App.

Tuesday, I completed another Daily Create of making a Pony Express Postmark by using the Sketchbook App again. This time I just wanted to recreate what the Pony Express Postmarks looked like and adding in the current date to it. After I did that, I downloaded Audacity to my computer and started fiddling with it. My computer then crashed as I was fiddling with it, but after I restarted it, I decided to do an assignment. The assignment I then completed was to make a memorable song reversed, so that people could guess what song you picked after listening to it backwards. After many frustrating minutes of using Audacity, I finally figured out how to make the song go backwards.

On Wednesday, I didn’t feel like doing the Daily Create that day. So I did 2 more assignments of the Sound Effects story and Radio Show Ideas. After thinking I was doing alright with Audacity, the sound effects story assignment proved me wrong. I spent hours trying to figure out how to put all the sound effects into a story. Since my created character was the Sheriff’s son that would uphold the law, I wanted to create a scene of a crime being committed as a prologue to the story of my character later tracking down the criminal. So I put sounds of a horse walking with a gunshot being heard seconds later while being accompanied by screams and then the horse running away with the criminal who shot the Indian, riding the horse away from the scene.

Then to cool down my anger from being frustrated from using Audacity, I thought it would be the best use of my time to come up with Radio Show Ideas. It ended up being tougher than I thought, because the more I thought of ideas. The worse the ideas became. I chose the best ideas that came to my head and listed them in my post.

The next day, I completed the last Daily Create by using my Sketchbook App again to create a Treasure map that looks pretty darn realistic in my opinion. I pretty much just randomly created a treasure map that I pictured in my mind. Then for the rest of the day I set up other assignments because I wanted to record my audio clips all at the same time. I set up the assignment “What Does A Song Mean to You”, just by thinking of my favorite song and finding the Youtube music video of the song. I also created a saved draft of it for later editing. The next assignment I set up was “Poetry Reading” in which I found my favorite poem and had to extend it to tell a story. So I found the poem online, and wrote on a notepad what I would say in the audio clip the next day.

After setting up the assignments, I started studying for my Marketing midterm and totally forgot about Live-Tweeting the DS106 radio show.

Finally, on Friday, I recorded myself using my phone for all the different audio clips that I needed and edited the assignments from the day before that I still needed to post. The recordings took me a couple takes because I either messed up the words or I just didn’t like the way I sounded. However, I finally felt satisfied with the recordings after recording myself some more. While also editing the rest of the assignments, I also posted all my audio clips onto SoundCloud. The last assignment that I did before this summary was the Radio Bumper, in which I recorded myself while being accompanied by a banjo playing in the background. This time, I knew what I was doing in Audacity and didn’t have any frustrations with it.

To conclude, I’m glad that I finally figured out Audacity and completed almost all of the assignments this week. Even though I’m still mad at myself for forgetting about the Live-Tweeting of the DS106 radio show, I’ve learned from my mistake and will now be placing alarms on my to-do list instead of just creating a to-do list. I look forward to learning something new next week.

Daily Creates:

Assignments:

War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast and Audio Reflections

Reversed

Cowboy Attack

Radio Show Ideas

Never Too Busy (Song)

Poetry Reading

DS106 Radio Bumper

SoundCloud:

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