This week has gone by so fast it’s unbelievable! All of my DS106 work caught up with me by the end of the week. Audio was something that kind of scared me, so I tried avoiding it at all costs. But in the end, I knew I needed to get it done. It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought! It was also kind of fun! I started with the easy things first, just listening exercises. Then gradually moved into creating my own audio.

• I first started with listening to the videos by Ira Glass. He described that stories start with anecdotes. They are just things that lead to one another. Then, comes the moment of reflections. This makes the point of the story and helps everything come together. It’s basically the reason why you are listening. He also described that finding the stories is a majority part of the work. It’s not adding the bells and whistles, but finding something that really clicks. I really connected with this through my biology experiments. I understand that finding that interesting thing that could turn into a mind blowing experiment. I explained this though in much more detail on my post about these videos. My favorite out of the two videos was the one by Jad Abumrad. He had such an eloquent way of speaking out his passion. He described how a listener is empowered by the absence of pictures because you get to use your imagination. He said that he paints the picture, but the listener has the brush. He just had such an amazing way of speaking about these things. I assume that is why he is so good at his job. He has a way with words.

• The next thing I did was listen to stories. I wanted to get a feel for the whole audio idea so I decided doing listening things would help me get a hang of it. I’m always in for a good mystery, so I chose two episodes of Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t really notice too many effects. These stories were from the 1950′s. However, I did notice that there isn’t much action. It seemed to be a lot of chit chat. I expected them to be looking at clues and finding them, when in reality Holmes would just sit there and think. Most of the sound effects just seemed to be pretty simple. There were a few footsteps and doors opening, but nothing too extravagant. I explained my feelings about the whole experience more in my Sherlock Holmes post.

• My ds106 radio listening experience was awesome! I tuned into the right live show with @onepercentyello. She gave me shoutouts and talked to me while I tweeted at her. It was really a personal experience. When I looked at the ds106 streaming page, It actually said no one was listening even though I was. I don’t know if it wasn’t working at the time, but I thought that was odd. I might have been the only one listening at the time because no one else was tweeting and @onepercentyello was only talking to me. It was definitely a cool experience. I talk about it more and share my tweets here.

• The two audio assignments we had were awesome! I dreaded these in the beginning of the week because it was unfamiliar territory, but in the end they turned out pretty good. I think my 5 sound story turned out better than my bumper, but overall I am satisfied with both. For the 5 sound story my influence was, of course, animals. I thought of the infamous chase between a dog and a cat and the noises that come with that fiasco. It was really fun to find the sounds and put them together to create a compelling story. My radio bumper was a bit more difficult to create. I didn’t have a really big influence for this project like I had for most of the other assignments for this class. But, I still went through with it to the best of my ability. I used a song that I really like lately and incorporated a “ds106 radio” computerized voice.

• The daily create were kind of on the back of my mind this week. Normally I am always thinking of great ideas I want to use, but this week my brain was fuzzy with them. I’m not sure why. I had 2 exams and a quiz this week that were crowding my mind, so that could have been the reason.

The first daily create was of the number 3. I have been staring at my calendar for quite sometime trying to make sense of all the things due and the things I need to get done and came across October 3rd. This is the day after my VMCAS (veterinary school application) are due. I can’t wait for that day to come so I can be relieved of all of this stress.

The next daily create was of graffiti. My roommate painted this picture over the summer from a pinterest idea. We always have joked that it looks like street art and she wanted to re-paint it. I’m glad she didn’t cause it turned out to be a perfect daily create.

p.s. if you have checked out pinterest (mostly girls) its a really cool site! It has a bunch of DIY crafts that are really cute, not to mention outfit ideas, recipes, and money saving things. I have an obsession.

The last daily create was on Miniature Golf day! I love Putt-putt and have always thought of it as a good “date night”. So I drew a boy and a girl on a date playing putt putt. I think that is a significant part of why Miniature golf is so important.

• So by the end of the week, all of the work caught up with me. I had purposely been avoiding creating my own sounds and I got a bit stressed when doing them. I’m glad they were so easy to do though! There wasn’t much to them at all and I am thrilled with the way my 5 sound story turned out. Knowing how to upload and put together audio opened up new things for further projects and even the daily daily creates. I thought some of the listening was boring (unfortunately Sherlock Holmes didn’t captivate me like expected), and others were so cool (ds106 radio). Like I said before, the daily creates were somewhat of a haze to me. They weren’t in the top of my mind like they normally were. I am definitely going to have to focus more on them next week!

Happy Mini Golf Day!