For this week, I was assigned to do: Reflections on the Ira Glass and Jad Abumrad videos, Summary of the radio stories with the techniques they used, three audio assignments, and four daily creates.

Starting with my daily creates  for the week, I created a book cover for the daily create on Monday. I decided to go with Shia Labeouf for my motivational book because  his motivational video was rather popular this past summer. For Tuesday, we had to create an emophoto, a photo that showcased emotions. I decided to go with an image of a guy who just made it into semifinals of a video game tournament. Wednesday, we had see if we could take a modern photo and recreate it to look old and worn. I took an image of my cat from a few years ago and used some of the effects in GIMP to make it look vintage. The last daily create I did for this week was the five card Flickr story. I chose images that had a building or showed a location, so the story ended up being about a character who was taking a stroll through the slums until they found a nice looking house and went back to the forest they live in.

I completed 3 audio assignments totaling up to 8 stars. The Radio Bumper assignment was three stars and I had a fun time creating it. It tells the story of a rookie radio broadcaster who is hosting a million dollar giveaway. My second audio assignment was the three and a half stars Sound Effects Story. For this audio story, I created a sword fight between two men in a field. Only one comes out the victor, but is he the good guy or the bad guy? That’s up to you to decide. For the third audio assignment, I chose the one and a half stars Autotune Something assignment. I decided to take the same motivational speech by Shia Labeouf that I based one of my daily create assignments around and make him seem demonic or having him fighting his inner demons by using Audacity and autotuning his voice.

Earlier in the week, I  did two  reflections on the Ira Glass and Jad Abumrad videos. In those reflections, I talked about the term co-imagining and how radio is special compared to visual media.  Radio and audio stories allow you to share ownership of stories since one person is giving you the details and the other is using their imagination to draw the story.

For the radio story assignment, I talked about three audio stories. One was from The American Story,  another was form Radio Lab, and the last is from The Truth. You can check my blog post about them for more detail, but I just wanna say that each of the stories had different ways to tell their stories. The one from Radio Lab focused on music and background noise; The American Story audio that I listened to focused on narration and told their story like it was a diary. The story form The Truth was more like a film that was missing its visuals. It didn’t have any narration just various scenes and locations from  what I could tell listening to the background noise.

I learned a lot about telling an audio story properly this week. Glass’ and Abumrad’s videos  really helped me with the audio assignments, especially my sound effects story. I will now remember to empathize with the listener and share the story with them by co-imagining. /they helped me realize how special audio is compared to other forms of media. I think it’s better to imagine what is happening in stories instead of being spoon-fed with images and actors like you see on television. I also saw Miles’ radio bumper and loved it, so I commented on his post and got an idea for my radio bumper.

Before this course, I have never used Audacity before, so it took me a bit of time to get used to how it works. The only other audio editing that I have done before was with Sony Vegas. It’s a lot simpler, but you can’t do nearly half the stuff  that you can in Audacity with Sony Vegas, so Audacity is now my preferred audio editing software. I don’t have any questions about this week’s material, but I am curious about how Glass and Abumrad got into audio and when did they realize that it was special compared to other media.