Ira Glass on Audio Storytelling

I started off the unit listening to Ira Glass and what he has to say about his work, afterwords writing a summary of his teachings you can find here.

A Radio Story About a Radio Station – Spooked Edition

The next part of this unit was to listen to a podcast and then examine its audio techniques. The podcast I chose is from the Spooked series, specifically The Haunting of Radio Central. Here, I talked about their use of layering, volume, timing and voice, and how that all contributed to a suspenseful narrative. Click here to check out my analysis of this episode!

Audio Bank Assignments

• A Trip Through Sound
  • This first assignment, I simply familiarized myself with audacity, practicing fading effects and layering.
• The Sound of Nature
  • For this next assignment, I began to experiment more with greater amounts of audio, working to put them together in a way that wasn’t too noisy.
• The Sound of Public Transportation
  • Unlike the first two assignments, this one kind of follows more of a story line of us (the audience) taking public transport in Chile.

Reflection

I definitely found this unit more difficult than the units on visuals and design. Nevertheless, I did learn a lot from Ira Glass and the Spooked episode, and I did also try my best on the bank assignments. Although making audio storytelling myself is really hard, I have found a new appreciation for those who do it for a living, it’s such an impressive skill to have.