This is probably something that will be mentioned repeatedly throughout my posts this week but hey, here we go. I have permanent hearing loss and my brother is an audio engineer.
Allow me to rephrase that; I am partially deaf and my brother records and edits music for a living. God has a sick sense of humor sometimes. If anyone wants to fact-check me on either of those things, I made a tweet on accessibility awareness day about my hearing loss, and I have mentioned my brother a few times in posts, like when I was getting my SoundCloud set up. So, with both of those things in mind, I was very nervous to start this week. When I watched the video module for this week and Professor Polack mentioned that “this is usually when people start disliking digital story telling” I thought “oh, awesome, and most people are not partially deaf, so this will be extra fun.”
I actually had a lot easier time with this week than I thought I would! And I had a lot of fun. Since this is something my brother does for a living (and we are very close) I enjoyed telling him about what I learned this week and showing him some of my completed assignments. He actually pushed me to do the one for five stars!
I learned quite a bit this week. I thought that the Foley sound technique was really cool and I enjoyed watching the video with the professional foley artists. This may be niche, but as I am someone with damaged hearing, seeing how the sound is produced and simultaneously seeing how it was used in the video was really really neat.
I also liked learning about the Wilhem Scream. My brother used to be an avid Star Wars fan, so I did recognize the scream from those movies.
I had the most fun (and the most challenges) with the Story Time assignment. It was not super difficult, but there were a lot of steps for me to figure out (like converting an mp3 file to a wav file). But, once I got the hang of things I had fun adding sound effects to my story, and it made using Audacity for my other assignments that much easier.
An overview of my third week in digital storytelling:
Ira Glass and Jad Abumrad Summary
TED Radio Hour and ScottLo Summary
Audio Assignments
- Story Time (3.5 Stars)
- 80’s Product Radio Commercial (5 stars)
- Create A Place (4 Stars)
