Out of all the different mediums we used for projects this semester, sound editing in Audacity was my favorite. I think my interest was a result of the fact that working with audio is not something I get to do often, and I listen to a lot of music, podcasts, and other audio ever day so it’s a medium I’m interested in. It was fascinating to learn more about the process of recording and then editing audio.
The main lesson I got out of this project was that creating a good audio piece is not nearly as easy as it sounds. Listening to most podcasts, it seems effortless, but that’s because the people behind them know what they’re doing and have often been doing that sort of work for years.
Going into my own interview, my intention was to have a very free flowing, stream-of-consciousness kind of conversation, so I didn’t prepare any specific questions or talking points ahead of time. If I had to do this project again, I would definitely put more forethought into what exactly I was going to say or what questions I might ask. The project turned out well, but during the process of recording I sometimes wondered how the interview would turn out. I also had not accounted for the time limit while I was recording. I had just assumed that I could cut out enough to get the interview to an appropriate length. As it turned out, I got lucky again here and my interview was just barely over the 8-minute constraint of the assignment after I cut it down as far as I felt I could without losing any parts of the interview that I considered absolutely essential. However, it did take a good bit of trimming as I conducted two interviews that came close to 40 minutes of audio before any editing.
I was very happy with how my Audacity project ended up turning out, but the errors and miscalculations that I made in the earlier parts of the process taught me a lot about what to do and what not to do in the future. I think part of the reason that I enjoyed this project so much was because I learned a great deal as I was going, and I was able to learn the program much more quickly and easily than many of the other pieces of software we’ve used this semester.
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