Audio Project: Leproso Interview

Have a listen.

I began this project with little to no idea of what to do. I don’t particularly like writing stories, or even telling them for that matter. So I came to class on Tuesday with only a vague idea of reading some philosophy and altering it a bit to make it more understandable, more entertaining, or preferably, both. On Tuesday though, someone mentioned doing an interview. I have a friend in a metal band who’s good at talking, so I thought this would be a perfect idea. Unfortunately, it just so happens that I was ignoring the actual assignment. As a result of the positive feedback I got with the interview idea, I forgot to check the rubric to see that the entire thing was supposed to be a pre-written essay and instead wrote down only my part of the interview. The initial idea I had for this assignment was that we were supposed to be experimenting with sound to change the nature of a message, so the impromptu interview seemed fine to me at the time. I planned to add some of the band’s demo cd to the mix to give a podcast vibe, but both meeting up with the guy and getting the music proved time-consuming. After getting the interview done and realizing that tweaking a half hour of audio down to 5 minutes was neither fast nor easy, I came to the sad conclusion that my part of the audio was nearly indecipherable. I re-recorded my part of the talk and changed some words around to fit what I thought were the most important parts of the dialogue.
I always had the intention of using Garage Band’s fade tool in the interview to allow music to come in and out of the conversation as in the actual “All Songs Considered” podcast (which I mimicked), but since I was going to add my voice in later to make up for the lousy quality provided by the directional mic on my mp3 player (as well as my own frantic ramblings), I thought it would also be appropriate to use it when my questions and comments came into the audio and kind of smooth out that transition. And, since that was already happening, I decided to tweak the style of the original show to make my part of the audio more separate from my friend in the band by backing my voice (which would now be lacking the background noise of Neil Street outside of the Blind Pig) with music from their demo cd. I thought this would allow the listener to be more involved with the topic, especially if they don’t have much of a background in death metal music, and also to prevent the interview from becoming boring. After hearing the music in the background, it seemed to work for the entire thing, so I left it in and changed the volume where it seemed necessary. And by layering the elements of vocal delivery and music, as in the McKee reading, I was hoping to allow people to make a positive association with the music that was playing as they heard what Erik had to say about it. Sound effects and silence seemed out of place to me, given the background noise and the nature of the music.
With the “impromptu interview” idea, I got some the little funny parts and background noise that give it the feel of immediacy and “there-ness” that I like so much about it. This is apparently not the intent of the assignment, but as far as learning about sound within messages, I have a far better understanding of the work that goes into such projects.
Looking back, my voice was far too quiet and I should have enunciated better and I should have recorded my voice where there wasn’t a computer fan whirring loudly in the background.