@kelseybmatthe7 wanna be on the radio together?? #wesocool

— Kendall Simonpietri (@KendallSimonpie) September 21, 2012

This is how the radio show started. Kendall, Shawn, and me. Also, we were supposed to have another person but he never responded to us. We go by Team Awesome. Together through email we decided that soundscape was the best because we could work individually and that the theme should be a road trip. What we’ve tried to do is evoke all the feelings of a roadtrip through children’s books, poetry, random commercials for attractions on the way, and sound stories. It flowed pretty well from there.

We met up with the goal of stitching everything together, but we ended up recording more tracks and adding background music to some tracks. Shawn did a great job with Oh the Places You’ll go!. I love his reading of it. He also knows way more about audacity than I ever will. Shawn and Kendall ended up stitching everything together, which they did an excellent job of! Kendall and I would talk about ideas and send emails of things back and forth with things we thought would be road-trip appropriate. It’s really funny because we both ended up with almost the exact same radio bumper too! (from Vacation). Here are my contributions:

I also recorded another poem that we didn’t end up using:

Whitman’s Song of the Open Road is about 15 sections that take up approximately a half-hour of recording. I cut it down to 4:30 and Kendall showed me how to put background music on it. We chose a meadow scene ( you can hear dogs and outdoorsy sounds) because the poem is something that celebrates the outdoors. Also, Whitman is VERY wordy, so it was difficult to read and not mess up (I did A LOT of takes).

I thought as a group we worked really well together. I had another obligation when Kendall and Shawn were putting the show together, and they were very understanding. When we would communicate over email, we tried a google doc which Shawn kind of transformed into a spreadsheet with a time breakdown that was very helpful. Kendall and Shawn are both brilliant at audio so I was lucky to have worked with them. (I hope their skills have rubbed off on me a little bit!).

I did challenge myself this time. I was going to read the Road Less Traveled by Frost, but found this Whitman poem instead. Whitman is completely out of my comfort zone but I gave it a shot and I liked it. Also, I love to do voices but I hate hearing my own voice. That in itself was a challenge when I had to listen to my recordings to make sure all of the content was there. It was also a challenge to edit the Whitman down and have it still make sense.

Our final product is not the way I had envisioned it. I like it a lot better than what I thought it was going to be. This evokes road-trip feelings with putting a road-trip on someone else. For example, I listen to Whitman and think about driving in the mountains. Other people may imagine themselves walking along a back road. We picked interpretive pieces. Kendall did some fantastic mash-ups and a sound story. The whole show is just dedicated to the feel of the road trip. Shawn and Kendall stitched it together beautifully. I think we are all really pleased with the final product.

I never in a million years thought I would like audio more than the photo assignments. BUT, I do! I love audacity and it seems like I’m always learning something new. I like how easy it is to edit tracks and add background music to things. Audio is so personal and voices hold so much emotion. I love spoken word and hearing other people talk. While facial expressions do show emotion a lot easier, voices (at least to me) are so much more emotionally oriented. I never thought I would be an audio fan, because this is the one part of the course I was seriously dreading. I know how finicky audio can be and I was not happy when I was reading the radio show specs. Now, I’m in love!

Here’s our radio show too (I don’t know if it needs to be here or not):