Practice Makes Perfect

Collective Storytelling, Week 3 (February 12, 2008)

Well….actually, 22-minute audio piece. Wow…editing down material is HARD!

Click here to listen to the audio piece. This remains a work in progress.
(File Upload Pending)

I do not find audio editing software particularly intuitive. I spent this week compiling and editing audio files from three separate interviews that I had conducted back in February along with transitional inserts of my own. My biggest challenge was making the volume consistent across files. Despite a good try, I never succeeded in adjusting the files to match. As a result, the lowest volume on music track was still too loud for some sections of voice. Nor did I achieve another fundamental goal of the assignment yet: editing down to 5 - 7 minutes. As I said…..the piece remains a work in progress.

Lessons Learned

- 5 minutes is not much time. Editing down material and splitting fluid conversations into snippets is HARD!!!!!!! There must be tricks I don’t know and cannot intuit.

- Collecting compelling info on same subject from multiple people: Be really clear and consistent about what material to collect. Stick strictly to original question(s); don’t alter them slightly from interviewee to interviewee. Create subquestions based on material already collected to be sure content is consistent from interviewee to interviewee. Impromptu questions are helpful to generate additional rich material.

- I am unpleasantly surprised by my continued confusion over how to use Audacity Effects/Amplify, Normalize and the Envelop Tool in order to get consistent volume control across multiple clips of materialfrom different sources. I thought I had figured this out. Every time I try to apply Effect/Amplify to a section whose volume is too low, the volume goes to nothing. Alternatively, the Envelop Tool only seems to let me reduce amplitude of the loudest sections to match the low volume sections rather than increase volume of low sections to match the loudest. This is discouraging.