By: Sarah Andrews Photography

By: Sarah Andrews Photography

By: Sarah Andrews Photography

Footage with my iPhone, vocals (my voice) recorded at school and processed using pro tools.

By: Sarah Andrews

I have never done an audio recording before, so this whole experience was rather interesting. I wanted to come up with a story. I really did not know what kind of story, expect that I had wanted to play with voice fluctuations-which in my spare time, is a lot of fun. But recording my voice deliberately was a whole other can of worms. But I learned a lot.

When it came to equipment, I had hoped to experiment with the Snowball microphone from the Media Equipment checkout. But my schedule was rather conflicting, so I opted to use my laptop’s built-in mic for the first time…ever-for this kind of project. I also recorded about 90% of this audio in my room. And that is not built with any sort of acoustics whatsoever. Plus, I was facing my wall, so that sound, I think, was reverberating back into the recording. I was also a bit congested, so that only added to the outcome of the audio. The last few seconds was recorded in one of the study rooms within the library. That was fun.

So in all, the audio is not a great as I had hoped. I found myself doing a lot of retakes, one right after another, on the same track, repeating the same line. If I found a combo that I could work with, I cut and copied, moved, or recreated a new track. That was actually a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I did not give myself enough time to really play with Audacity, so most of what I did was copying, pasting, or cutting.

It was definitely a challenge when the time came for post production. I had recorded three, no, four different voices and had to align them so that, as the story flowed, the sub-voices would come into the right locations. The music was a lot of fun to play with. I learned rather quickly how to pick apart the parts I liked and wanted to use.

Overall, though the quality is not as I had hoped, I did have fun and learned a lot about audio.

Really quickly, I wanted to list the resources used:

1. From Teresa’s music library. I used All About Us-its Royalty free.
2. The image used in my audio file is from Photo by Anete Lūsiņaon Unsplash

I hope you enjoy the audio. Thank you!

By: Maurissa Keller

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/348782084&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true“>

In my audio file, the idea was to tell a story about a teenage boy who gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before he finds out, the devil approaches him disguised as a man. He introduces himself as Maurice and says that he is from the Make a Wish Foundation. Because the boy doesn’t know yet that he is terminally ill, he is rude to Maurice, then Maurice leaves. The doctor enters and tells the boy the news. His heart races and then it jumps time, into the next chapter where the boy contacts Maurice to grant his wish. Maurice manipulates the situation and takes the boy to a different realm where the boy looks like an outlaw and is arrested. They wake up in a jail cell, and the boy just wants to go home. Maurice tells the boy that in order to go back he has to recite a chant. Without questioning what they chant does, the boy willingly participates. Once again they transfer realms into hell. The boy tries to ask what is going on but Maurice turns into his real self and devours the boy.

The meaning or lesson behind the story in a really weird and underdeveloped way, is that sometimes someone will walk into you life offering to help sometimes even in your weakest moments. Despite their kind approach, if you are not careful they might turn their back on you and use you for their own benefit. I was excited for this project, but not very happy with the outcome of my work. I had help from a friend with voices, and I wished I would have directed it more and spoke up more about what I really wanted. 

For my audio project I had a hard time choosing an idea to work on and ended up doing a reading of one of Aesop’s fables. I wasn’t very familiar with a lot of them and decided on one that I could figure out how to add effects to and time with music. I decided on using two tracks that I found off of incompetech.com to add an implication of a tone change in the story I was reading, figuring out how to mix them together without creating a jarring change was probably what I spent the most time on when editing everything together. I used protools for this project because I was already a bit more familiar with it and learning audacity seemed a bit daunting, though I’m thinking about revisiting it later just to know how to use both platforms. I’m fairly new to audio production so everything is still a learning process for me, this project in particular was weird for me to work on because listening to the sound of my own voice played back over and over again made me super uncomfortable, but getting past that I was happy with how it turned out overall. This was my best attempt at a reading that sounded like an audio version of a children’s book.

By: Andrea Del Rio