Check out my first-ever podcast here! (please excuse the generic flower photo; I needed to add an image in order upload the file from iMovie).
Reflection:
When I first took on this project, I really had no specific ideas in mind. I knew I wanted my podcast to be as authentic as possible, as much my own creation as it could possibly be. I wanted to work primarily with sounds that I personally recorded, so I spent a lot of time simply walking around with an audiorecorder, all the while unsure of how my recordings would coalesce. I began carrying the recorder with me everywhere, stretching my arms towards the tops of trees to capture the chirping of birds in the morning, whipping it out as motorcyles drove by, as dogs barked, as someone ran past me in flip flops. Eventually, I realized that voices, too, count as sounds. I decided to try recording a conversation amongst my friends while we ate lunch outside on the green. I placed the recorder in the middle of the circle, and eventually everyone more or less forgot it was there and resumed candid conversations. This ended up providing me with substantial material for my final product, after hours of playing the audio back and splicing up the conversation into small segments that I thought represented some of the attitudes of Dartmouth students’ during spring.
In terms of rhetorical devices, my entire podcast obviously relied immensely on exemplification. Initially, I set up the task of determining what spring at Dartmouth sounds like, then provided examples in the form of a compilation of sounds I recorded. After my into and a reading of an e.e.cummings poem about spring, I divided the second half of my podcast into two main segments. The first consisted of examples of some generic sounds of spring that I recorded on campus (no vocals), while the second provided examples of things Dartmouth students might say on a spring day.
I implemented music into my podcast in a few different ways, drawing upon the different planes on which we listen to music (as explained by Heidi McKee in her article). Because I crafted my podcast in the style of a radio show, I used upbeat break-beats preceding the intro, following the outro, and during transitions between segments. These served the “sheerly musical” plane in that they contributed to the movement and structure of the piece. During my spoken intro and outro, on the other hand, I layered some happy music onto the background in order to set a specific tone for the piece, thus entering the “expressive plane.” In the section following the poem reading, which I used to introduce the composition of sounds coming next, I chose to use a different instrumental than the one used during the intro and outro. To me, it still sounded like spring, but simultaneously invoked a slightly more inquisitive tone, which I thought complemented the questions I asked.
Arguably, however, I did not need to introduce the sounds using my voice as much as I did. In imitating something along the lines of a radio show or This American Life, I focused on my vocal delivery quite a bit. I tried to channel my inner radio host and many of my transitions involved vocal segways. My voice did a lot of explicit arguing, or at least explicitly laid out everything I was hoping to cover, orienting readers in a very specific way and thus perhaps limiting their interpretations. In another version of this project, I may have let the sounds speak for themselves a bit more. Choosing to read a poem and then have a spoken transition afterwards took a lot of time – listeners don’t actually hear the “sounds of spring” I collected until about a third of the way into the podcast.
Again, I think that the use of break-beats and the way that I delivered certain lines vocally (e.g., goooood morning Dartmouth!) clearly indicated that my piece was attempting to imitate a radio genre. The theme of spring is explicit in so many ways, from my spoken words to the music I chose to the sounds I selected.
Composing a piece to be heard rather than read is more difficult than one might assume. Although you may have more liberty in some avenues of expression (trying to convey a particular sound in writing is difficult), the editing process is exhaustive. I had to be very deliberate and precise in order to give the piece the exact feel I wanted it to have. In addition, I ran into a lot of technical difficulties. I began making the composition on iMovie, only to realize that I could not layer multiple sound tracks, as I wanted to during the intro and outro. I had to adjust and create those parts separately in Garage Band, save them as iTunes songs, and import them into iMovie. Likewise, I would spend what felt like and eternity listening to a thirty-minute conversation, cutting out all the little phrases I wanted to use, and then line them all up in order to form a semi-cohesive whole. Occasionally, after adding more and more snippets to the specific arrangement, I would play the podcast through and realize that the new clips I’d added had replaced some others, so I’d have to listen to the entire original mp3 again, re-locate those portions, re-cut them, and re-arrange them. When I finally got everything there and together, I had to listen to my almost-final product again and again to assure that it flowed, that it sounded as seamless as it could given the time constraints. To be honest, I think that I could’ve taken another two weeks to finish this project. There are so many little things I noticed during the editing process that I simply did not have the time to redo or add or change.
Overall, the podcast assignment was a satisfying challenge. It was a learning experience, both fun and stressful. It definitely inspired me to continue playing with sound and to keep working on my vocal delivery, which is impeccable not only to projects like this one but to presentations, speeches, interviews, and more.