My week has been hectic, to say the least so I was not able to put as much time towards ds106 as I would have liked to. On top of my ds106 work which included cohosting the ds106 show and tests and papers for other classes, Harvey went into tech this week, meaning that the costumes were due so I spent approximately 10 hours in the costume shop over the past week sewing for it, helping to get everything done.

Despite the amount of work I had to do, I managed to get everything done, starting with listening to an hour of ds106 radio on Wednesday. I listened to the show for two hours while Dr. Jones was hosting and really enjoyed the mix of dance music that he played. The show was not what I was expecting, I thought it would be more talk than music and was pleasantly surprised that it was the opposite.

I do not listen to radio all that often, but hearing what Ira Glass and Jad Abumrad had to say about audio storytelling helped me to better understand the rest of the audio assignments. Glass made me realize how different print journalism is from audio journalism. The components of each are different but yet the two types of journalism and storytelling can still convey the same messages. Jad Abrumrad talked about how the radio is a dying art form and how in order to tell a story over the radio, you need to paint a picture for listeners to visualize.

I thought of what Glass and Abrumrad had to say while listening to the Doppelganger episode of This American Life. The show used sound effects to help keep listeners engage and to better explain to listeners where they were recording. These sound effects helped listeners to paint pictures in their minds of what they were hearing and what was going on. They used music without words to transition between parts of a story and bumpers between stories to remind listeners what they were listening to.

Initially, I was scared of doing audio, but after figuring out that I could record sound quite well using the Voice Memos app on my iPod Touch to record the audio and Audacity to mix the sound. I used The Internet Archive to find free sounds for my Sound Story and mixed it in Audacity. It was harder than I thought to capture the sounds of sewing, but in the end I thought that it sounded rather good. For the Radio Bumper assignment, I recorded what I wanted to say and layered it over a clip of Last Ride In by Green Day.

For Daily Creates this week, I chose to do the Acrostic Poem, Retitled Movie Poster and the Hum Your First Musical Memory assignments. For the Retitled Movie Poster assignment, I downloaded a copy of the Magic Mike movie poster, opened it in Photoshop, used the blend and paintbrush tools to remove the title from it then retitled the movie Sausage Fest! using Cocksure as my font to give emphasis to the fact that the movie is all about male strippers. For the Hum Your First Musical Memory assignment, I hummed the theme to Thoroughly Modern Millie into Voice Memos, emailed it to myself then uploaded it to SoundCloud.

Once again, I found my comment group to be less than constructive. I was told to try to get my class work done earlier in the week so that there would be more material to comment on and to reorganize my weekly summaries with headers, which just does not fit my writing style. My comments were mostly about how others could improve by making their weekly summaries more than a link and a one sentence reflection for each item as well as how to use twitter. I’ve realized that my blog is a little more fancy and more themed than many other blogs since I use sewing puns and themes throughout it while others have blog posts that are a little random.

This week I learned a lot about audio. I’m excited to be finally focusing on photography and design in the upcoming weeks since those are my strengths  I am also excited to get a new comment group with the group project groups. I feel as if I may get more constructive comments by working with new people and am excited to check out the work of others.