This audio project was easier for me than the graphic work we’ve done previously in this course – probably because I tell stories all the time. So coming up with the story of our community and the challenges it’s facing with redistributing our kids and changing our school system wasn’t hard. Determining how to do it was a bit more challenging, and incorporating the changes suggested by my peers took far longer than I anticipated.
I knew I liked the format of All Things Considered from National Public Radio. I’ve written enough scripts for radio that I knew I could do most of the voice work myself in the narration format. To begin, I wrote out the elements I thought I’d like to include: an interview for actualities, ambient sound under my voice as I narrated the piece, and perhaps music. I tried to think of it as a movie with no picture, if that makes any sense. My peers agreed that the format in the draft form was easy to listen to and engaging, but were concerned about three things: the shift in the ambient noise being too abrupt, the mechanical hum beneath the actualities that made it less clean in quality than the narration portions of the piece, and the difference in volume for the actualities from the narration.
While working on the script and story line for this piece I knew I wanted two sounds that people could identify with no matter where they live which would give them both an idea of our community and link into the basis for the story all about changes in the school district: the sound of waves lapping against the shore and children playing at school recess. Using those, I could set the tone of the story and paint a mental image to go with what was being said.
For the wave sound used in the introduction and exit, I took my iphone, with the Voice Record Pro app on it (purchased for $2.99) and went to one of the nearby parks in town located on the water’s edge and took about a 1 minute recording then emailed the recording to myself to be able to download it into Audition. Since school has been out for the summer for three weeks now, I knew it would be difficult to get the sounds of children playing on the school ground and I knew taping it at any of our local parks would leave me open to extra ambient noises since most of our parks are near waterways, roads or construction zones for the time being. I relied instead on a recording called Kids playing on school-years by Caquet found at freesound.org
I also interviewed a member of the community committee that had worked on determining how our schools would change. Specifically I picked out one that I knew well enough to know she had public speaking skills, so the interview wouldn’t be full of ums, ahs and other assorted sounds that would have to be cut out to make the interview sound clean. I also knew she had just had a sixth grader “graduate” from our school, so she was a prime person to look at things from the prospective of a parent whose child is going to be directly impacted by the shift in our system in the next two years which would give her authenticity when talking about what concerned parents of kids moving into a middle school model. I wanted this to be an educational piece, not just about education as a subject, but actually educating listeners on how middle schools were different and why our community chose this change. The original interview went slightly over nine minutes in length and there was a mechanical hum underneath the entire interview which I suspect came from either the over head lighting or the air circulation system in the school room where I conducted the interview.
Once I had my different elements recorded and pulled into Audition, I started editing heavily. The narration and actuality recordings I did were cut into the most pieces and stitched together based on how much time I needed to cut to get the interview bits I wanted to fit in the allotted time frame for the overall piece. I also began to slice out snippets of the interview I thought would work and placed my narration, the actualities and ambient sounds all into separate tracks in a multi-track view. From there I listened to the interview and sliced it using the Razor Selected Clip Tool (R) according to natural breaks in her speech patterns so I could use the pieces I needed to still get the story across and come in under the time required then used the Move Tool (V) to position them in two final tracks one for narration and actualities and one for ambient sound. I did the same for my narration then went back again and made sure that any stutters, ums, ahs or strange pauses in both narration and actualities were cleaned up to make them both sound smooth.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t realize that I needed to use the Noise Reduction/Restoration Tool on a complete segment to make it work effectively in removing that mechanical hum, so none of the work I’d done for my draft was useable because I couldn’t use the same noise point for each. Cutting had changed them so that the program no longer recognized the hum in the cut segments. I had to return to the uncut versions of my narration and actualities and start over again, which doubled the time it took on the finished project. To remove the hum, I brought the uncut version of the interview into Audition and expanded the view of it until only the very beginning of the interview, where I had left about 5 seconds of open space that had just the mechanical hum and no one talking prior to the interview, and used Edit->Select->Select Current View Time, then used Effects->Noise Reduction/Restoration->Capture Noise Point (Shift + P) to isolate the mechanical hum I wanted to remove. I then used Effects->Noise Reduction/Restoration->Noise Reduction process (Cntrl +Shift+P) to remove the hum. Once I had a cleaned version of the actualities I spent another three hours recutting all the narration and actualities back to the clean form I’d had before to fit into the three minute segment.
For my ambient sounds I used the FX Pre-Fader/Post-Fader Tool (last little button on the individual track in multi-track which looks rather like a microphone and turns a dark red when used), which took some getting use to. I realized by moving my cursor up while bending the Fade Tool I could determine if the fade came from the lower end of the sound spectrum or the upper end. Bending it to the upper end gave the softer fade in sound. Bending it from the lower end of the spectrum made it seem more abrupt. I adjusted the background sounds of the waves and children playing and adjusted their volume levels to make them fit around the commentary and interview like bookends, bringing the story around full circle in sound. I deliberately transitioned the sounds, fading from the waves and fading into the school children, at the point where I stop talking about the community and start talking specifically about the schools. I worked to increase this fade and to bend it to the higher end of the spectrum to make it seem less abrupt in transition. I also faded out the background sounds further using click points on the sound line to manipulate the sound level with the Move Tool (V) once we get to the interview, partially because I had to kick up her vocals more since my phone was further away from her than me and recording her voice more faintly. I didn’t want background sound to compete with what she had to say (which I couldn’t control with the hum until editing). Initially I had the sound level for the ambient sound adjusted to -5.7db but reduced it further to -9.7db in the final version once the narration begins. To kick up the actualities I increased Tiffany’s voice to +14.7db which leveled out the volume between the narration and the actualities.
I listened to the tracks multiple times with my eyes closed just to focus in on the audio more clearly and pick out any jumps, skips, weird blips in the conversation where there’s a breath or pause that seemed unnatural, etc. And after all of that, here’s the finished draft. Listen in and tell me what you think.
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