This week was challenging and eye-opening as I know very little about audio.  I listened to four parts of Ira Glass’ series on storytelling.  His comment about creating crap for a couple of years before making something good was both encouraging and discouraging.  It is demoralizing to think that it will take that long to create something worthwhile; however, when listening to my two small audio creations I am heartened to think that I’ll get better.

Jad Abumrad’s comments about gut churn made me think of this YouTube video of a girl about to take her first turn on a massive ski jump that was mentioned in ETMOOC earlier this year.  You can play it safe and never experience this feeling, but if you want to do something worthwhile gut churn is a necessary part of the process.

The radio story I listened to was “How I got into College”.  I got caught up in listening to Emir’s story, but I did notice how music was used between segments, how the story was told by multiple people, how some tracks were layered and how Ira Glass editorialized.  One thing I wasn’t clear about was exactly how Michael Lewis fitted into the whole story.  He introduced the story but seemed to drop out pretty quickly as Ira Glass took over and provided the framework for the story.

I watched the live Google Hangout about DS106 Radio as I figured that I should try to learn as much as possible about how DS106 Radio works if I am to have any chance of completing the team radio assignment.  Most of it was way over my head though I picked up the names of some tools to check out – Nicecast, Ladiocast, SoundFlower64 and Broadcast Myself.  On an encouraging note, everyone in the Hangout looked like they were having fun.

Assignments and Daily Creates

This week I created a DS106 Radio bumper and a sound effects story that was neither 60 seconds or 5 sounds long.  These have both been written up in separate posts.   I also did two of the daily creates:

Penguin Postcards Grid by *s@lly*, on Flickr

High Line by *s@lly*, on Flickr

What I learned this week

This week I learned of radio personalities I had never heard, types of actors I had never seen, software I hadn’t used, and ways of listening I had never considered.  The challenges are to quickly learn new things and to just do it.  One thing I want to know about is attribution in SoundCloud.  I jammed all sorts of attribution info for the clips I used from Freesound in the description field on SoundCloud.  Is this the best way to provide attribution information?