This week was the hardest week by far. I usually am able to get a majority of my work done in the beginning of the week, so I never feel stressed. However, this week I was training for a new job and barely had the time to do any of the work for my classes. I also know nothing about audio and how to edit it, so this created a new challenge as I also had to learn how to do everything for this week. This created a crazy amount of stress for me throughout the week. Overall, I was able to get everything done before the due date, so this week was a success! The first thing on the list was to download and experiment with Audacity. This is an application I have never used before, so it was quite difficult. Downloading it was obviously easy, but getting to know a software I have never used before proved to be a problem. I tried getting to know it on my own, but this did not work. I tried watching youtube videos, but they didn’t help much either. I was having trouble getting everything into one fluid track, instead of overlapping each other. I eventually gave up after about an hour, and chose to face it head on when I had to do my assignments. I really enjoyed the videos we needed to watch. I thought Abumrad offered a great insight to what audio in storytelling really means. His examples and metaphors to help convey his points are very well thought out. It really offered some explanation to everything. It also made me focus more on the audio that I heard during this week to understand how it helps convey the story. Next was “Moon Graffiti.” This was a really amazing take on an audio story. I have recently been loving podcasts, so listening to this was the highlight of my week. I tend to lean towards listening to more crime based podcasts, so this was a nice twist. Everything in the podcast have some meaning behind it. Every audio component helped tell the story, which I don’t normally realize in the crime podcasts. Crime podcasts use facts and narrators to tell the stories, while this needed actual audio tracks and voices to help convey the story. It really did convey the message it was trying to. Creating a radio bumper was a really interesting idea. It was the first thing I did to experiment around with making my own audio. This caused some embarrassment for me, as I didn’t know what to say AND I hate hearing my voice played back. I thought about what I would normally hear on the radio to promote radio shows and went from there. I chose to keep it simple, add a secret agent track in the back, and add a slogan to pull it all together. My voice came off a little melodramatic because I had just woken up and it was honestly awkward to sit at my desk and create my own bumper. However, I think it turned out pretty good. The tweet along is what brought me great difficulty. I had just recently started training for my new job and didn’t have any spare time to get anything done. This, sadly, inhibited me from listening to the audio drama live. I was very nervous because of this, and emailed Professor Bond. He was very understanding and allowed me to simply listen to it on my own terms and write an analyzation on it. This eased my stress greatly and I listened to it during my commute to the university. I held true from my weekly summary last week to include the star ratings into my summaries for the assignment banks. This is one of the only aspect I was able to carry over, especially with how busy I was. For the mandatory assignment bank, we had to create a morning routine out of audio tracks. This was THE HARDEST thing for me this week. As earlier I stated that I gave up on figuring out Audacity after about an hour, as soon as I picked it up for this assignment I wanted to rip my hair out. This is where I started to experiment around again, and my boyfriend saw the anger in my eyes and decided to see if he could figure it out. I couldn’t figure out how to make everything into one track, it just kept overlapping all of the sounds. After five minutes of having my laptop, he found out you can cut the tracks and then just copy and paste them all into one track. After he handed me back my laptop it was go time and I finished this assignment no problem. The syllabus also stated to not make this a typical morning routine, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to bring in my character for one of the assignment banks. I made the morning routine focus around her as a spy. I felt like this jazzed up the assignment and made it an original morning routine. My first assignment bank assignment was to post a video of a memorable song, and then through audio explain why it has so much meaning to you. I thought about this topic for a while, and even went through music on my phone to help. I eventually thought of Back to Black by Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse is a very nostalgic artist to me. She was my sisters favorite artist and I remember her having her CD in her car and popping it in whenever I got in. I talked about how one night, she picked me up late at night and we had a sleepover. The entire car ride from Woodbridge to Springfield we listened to old throwbacks. This was one of the songs that she played, and not only do I love this song because of the memories, but I also love this song because of the passion and meaning the song has behind it. Recently, when I rediscovered this song, it gave me goosebumps at how well this song is executed. Amy Winehouse was truly a legend. My second assignment was a celebrity speed date. I had to say all that I could to my favorite celebrity in the hopes that they would want another date with me. I took this as an opportunity to make my celebrity Lana Del Rey. I also interpreted the assignment into my own. I did not want to date Lana, but instead become friends with her and hangout. I also did specifically say exactly what I would say to her, I basically just said what I would actually do. I would want to have a conversation where I get to know her, and I ask questions about her and we can relate and joke around. I didn’t want to come off as a typical fan, but instead show her how special she is and focus the conversation around her personally. I feel like as a celebrity, she probably doesn’t get that very often. I picked Lana because she has gotten me through some tough times. Her music is very relaxing and beautiful (and sometimes a little raunchy). I used to listen to her with my friends also, so her music is very personal to me. My last assignment bank was to create a new sound on free sound. This was quite easy once I got the hang of it. I went through my videos to see which sounds I had, and came across one of my family singing my mom happy birthday. I feel like this video had a lot that normal happy birthdays lack. In this one, everyone is singing, and my mom is giggling and singing along. I felt like it added a personal touch to the entire track. Then I sent the video to my laptop, grabbed my phone, recorded a voice memo of it from my phone, sent the voice memo to my laptop, and uploaded it to Soundcloud. This may sound complicated, but I found it really worked for me. I did almost all of my assignments this way, and found it was the best way for me to do them. Daily Creates: Brainstorming radio show ideas was pretty simple. I noticed on a lot of my classmates blogs they did not relate it to the theme. In the syllabus it says to do so, so this offered a little bit of guidelines to create my ideas around. I wanted something that would be interesting to everyone, despite if they were enrolled in this class or not. I just grabbed my notebook, jotted down a few ideas, and made a post further explaining them. I’m actually really pleased with all of the ideas I came up with. Questions of the Week: How do sounds tell a story? Sounds tell a story by further enforcing the facts. One could say that they got into a brutal car crash, or they could have a clip of the car crash with the tires squealing and the giant boom. It creates a specific image in the viewers mind, that can still be manipulated. It offers a sort of second storytelling that gives even more detail to further depict the story. How do they convey a sense of time and place? Audio tracks can easily convey a sense of time and place. For example, we associate birds chirping in the morning and a rooster crowing morning sounds. If one adds these to their story, the listener will know that it is morning time. If there are car noises, one can assume that they are around a place surrounded by driving vehicles, like the highway. The storyteller just has to use commonly associated sounds to convey what time and place they want to to their audience. A sense of action? This fits the same theme. If there are sounds of punching and fighting, one can assume that there is a fast paced and high action scene taking place. If there are crickets chirping, one can assume nothing is going on. It also takes into account the things we associate sounds with. Commenting was quite another thing I fell short on. Last week I talked about how I needed to comment everyday, and I was going to strive to do that this week. I feel like I did comment more, but it was all packed together instead of spread out over the week. Next week my schedule will be better, so I will honestly try my hardest to comment every single day. I enjoyed doing the posts of the week. It forced me to go through as many posts from this week that I could to find the best. I noticed that one blog in particular got two out of the three of my submissions. I really enjoyed looking through everyones posts this week to find the best, it inspired me to step out of my comfort zone to achieve the things they did this week. I always look through the blogs every week to comment, but finding the best this week also pointed out the things that I didn’t like. I now know what I won’t be doing for next week, while also being inspired to achieve more. After an insanely stressful week, I am proud to say WEEK FIVE IS DONE!