Overview
After you’ve made a trial recording of your audio essay, you will work on further developing, organizing, and improving the text of your essay, in response to feedback from your classmates as well as what you learn by listening to your own and other students’ trial recordings. You might also make an appointment to see me to discuss ways to develop the draft.
Then you will prepare what counts as your first “real” draft of the audio essay, which will be more polished than the trial version though still nowhere close to being “finished” in the sense of a final version. You will record this version in an audio editing application such as Audacity or GarageBand (rather than Sound Recorder or Quick Time Player). Your classmates and I will give you detailed feedback on this draft. You will then use what you learn from our feedback and from the process of giving feedback on other audio essay drafts and revise yours further, working to improve both the text of the essay as well as the quality of the recording and any sound effects you want to include.
How to Create a First Draft
To make a first draft of your audio essay, you will follow most of the same steps described on the handout: How to make an audio essay trial recording But because a full draft should be a bit more polished, follow the tips below. You will also follow these tips, plus a few more, when you create the final version of your audio essay.
- Consider inviting a friend to join you, so that you can read the essay to a live audience. Also consider having a glass of water handy in case your throat gets dry.
- Make your audio recording in a location that has good sound absorption, to reduce the chance of echoes or a hollow sound to your voice. Ideally the location should be small and enclosed as well as filled with soft, padded surfaces, such as the inside of your car or your closet. A small bedroom with carpeted floors, a closed door, and lots of padded furniture in it might also work well. Another option is to make an appointment to use a sound recording booth in the Digital Media Lab (contact Tim Riggs). If you happen to discover other locations on campus that work well for audio recording, let me know and I’ll share them with the class.
- Be sure to record plenty of silence at the start of your file as well as between each major section. You might even want to stop recording after each section or subsection, to make it easier to edit each of them. This would also be a good time to take a sip of water.
- Also pause for a few beats between paragraphs, both to let the listener catch up and also to make it easier to edit a particular paragraph if you make a mistake while reading it (rather than having to go back to the beginning).
- If you stumble briefly over a word here or there, or if you end up coughing or clearing your throat a few times, that’s fine. But if you have a major stumble or a coughing fit, or if a background noise intrudes (like a ringing phone, barking dog, etc.), then plan to re-record that section.
- If you want to include background music, select a piece without vocals or with very quiet vocals and adjust the volume of the music track so that it doesn’t overwhelm the voice track. It would be better for listeners to be barely able to hear the background music than for them to be barely able to hear you! You might also want to have the background music fade out completely after you’re a few sentences in to the intro (and to each section, if applicable). Then have it gradually fade back in at the end, as you read the last few sentences of the essay, and then fade out again at the end of the recording.
- If you want to use other sound effects, such as little musical “blurbs” that help to signal a transition from one section of the essay to another, choose them carefully so that they fit with the overall style and theme of your essay and serve a purpose, such as giving listeners a cue that you’re about to shift to a new section. The sound effects should add interest and a touch of creativity to your project, rather than being distracting by being corny, silly, overly-dramatic, or otherwise inappropriate. Also take care to adjust the volume of the sound effects so that they don’t suddenly “attack” the listener with a loud noise.
- When you’re finished recording and you’ve edited out and re-recorded specific parts as needed, you may stop there. Audio editing applications give you the ability to fine tune your audio recording to an incredible degree, but as long as your recording maintains a consistent volume throughout, that’s all you need to do, unless of course you just want to play with the options for fine tuning. (You might want to go ahead and save a copy of your original file and/or export an mp3 version before you go fiddling around too much, in case you really mess something up.)
If you’re not very far into the whole recording or into one particular section, just delete what you’ve got and start over.
If you’re already too far in, then record four or five seconds of silence and then start over at the beginning of the paragraph (and keep going until the end of the section or paper). If you’ve been pausing between paragraphs, it will be easy to find where the original paragraph with the stumble starts, so you can drag from there to the part where you were silent after the stumble and delete it. Then join the new recording to the earlier part.
GarageBand has a bunch of sound effects built in, which you can access from the “Loop Browser” (by clicking on the icon shaped like an eye in the lower right corner of the ’08 and ’09 versions and on the left, I think, in earlier versions.) The effects that are similar to what you might hear as transition sounds in a radio program are called “Stingers.” You can also access sound effects from iLife and iMovie.
However, I do not recommend using sound effects that emulate real world sounds, such as doors closing, babies crying, horses galloping, or hands clapping, except maybe in the rare instance of an essay that is written in a kind of radio-play format. These effects are fun to play with but might be better used in your personal audio and video projects.
NOTE: Save your file often as you’re working on it, so you don’t lose any changes. Don’t export the mp3 version until you’re finished editing the recording.
How to Export the First Draft
When you export the recording in mp3 format, give it an appropriate file name, such as: Lastname-audio-firstdraft The audio application will append the correct extension (.mp3) automatically. Also put the file in an appropriate location, such as the folder where you keep all your drafts for this class.
(See the appropriate handouts under Working with Audio for instructions on exporting.)
After you export the mp3 version, locate it on your computer and double-click on it, so that it launches in the default player for that format. Listen all the way through. If everything sounds good, you’re ready to post the first draft audio file (along with a copy of the text version you were reading from) to the appropriate sub-folder in our class Google Docs folder.
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