Not today, Audacity: A Reflection

Here I am wrapping up audio week. At the start of the week I was very nervous. Audio terrifies me and I have little to no experience with it. I started out the week just by learning about noir radio and reflection on my past experiences with audio. Even after learning more about it, I was still a little apprehensive about the rest of the week.

On Tuesday, I participated in the radio tweet-along. I enjoyed the story alright but the best part was really just having the opportunity to get to know the other students in the class. There’s definitely a lot of personalities that I have not had the chance to interact with. I also became a little more comfortable commenting and interacting with others on the internet.

I then started on my audio assignments for the week and got familiar with audacity. The first assignment I did was the required sound effects story assignment for 3.5 stars. This was really my introduction and test run with audacity. The next assignment I chose to do was the Radio Bumper that counted for no stars. This was where I started to get a little more creative with my use of audacity and started playing more with effects. I finished off two more audio assignments including emotion through sound for three stars where I chose stress because of how reflective it was of my life right now and can’t get it out of my head for two stars which allowed me the opportunity to experiment with recording audio. This brought my total up to 8.5 stars for the week.

I also started brainstorming for the midterm assignment we have coming up in a couple weeks. I based my idea primarily around Chronicle of a Death Foretold and its noir elements. I’m excited to see how the radio project will begin to develop over the next few weeks.

I also completed two daily creates this week. Normally, I would have preferred to do more but I honestly was pretty stressed and didn’t want to kill myself with a crazy workload this week. I did the cute puppy alert and the I’m sorry assignments. These were both a lot of fun and I was really happy with what I created.

All in all it was a pretty good week for digital storytelling. I learned a lot about audio editing. It also really made me appreciate the “learn-by-doing” style of this class. There are few other classes where you’re given the opportunity to try something out on your own and really experiment to learn how to use it. And now, I’m done with audio week!