I thought I might talk a bit about the “creative process” around the experiment I tried a couple of weeks ago with audio recording. Let’s see if I can paint that picture.
It was late and I was restless. There’s a line in a Barenaked Ladies song about “just thinkin’ bout what to think about”…and this was that. I’d been kicking around the idea of producing an igotw podcast for a while so I figured mebbe this was the time to take a crack at it. I’d done a little research on audio recording and it turns out there’s some awesome open source software for that. Audacity is rad, but as with anything designed for an audience with a super-specialized set of needs it has a learning curve. Anything beyond just pressing “record” and “stop” would take some learning.
I have a decent microphone, but after the first few attempts I realized I was getting a lot of background noise. I fiddled with the gain - even tried turning it all the way down - but I was still picking up ambient sounds. The primary contributor to background noise was the window AC unit in my office…so I turned the AC off and continued.
Once I had the background noise (mostly) sorted I realized I didn’t actually know what I was going to say. So I just kinda plowed ahead, stopping the recording when I ran out of words or tripped over my own tongue. I’d take down some notes and start over again from the beginning. For anyone planning on trying this: I would not recommend this approach. If you have something that you want to say please, for the love of God, write it down first. Rehearse that shit. …and maybe learn how to use the audio editing tools!
Anyhow…given the above, the feedback I got wasn’t super-surprising. Let’s walk through it a bit:
Your voice was quiet. I had the gain backed off as much as possible in order to keep from picking up background noise. I thought about trying to figure out how to use Audacity features to reduce background noises…but it seemed like it would be a lot of work to figure out how to do that. You don’t sound like yourself (until the end). I probably did 60 or so takes, 59 of which I threw away because I wasn’t interested in figuring out how to cut audio together from different recordings. The upshot of this: I said the first dozen words of the final recording 60 times, and I said the last dozen words of that recording exactly once. I’m going to go out on a limb here: if you say the exact same dozen words 60 times over the course of an hour in this context then there is high likelihood that you will fall into an “NPR-like” tone for those dozen words. I could hear crickets in the background. I turned the AC off so my mic wouldn’t pick it up as background noise, but it was hot so I opened the windows. Honestly? I actually consider this to be a feature of the recording as opposed to a defect. In fact, if I decide to do another one I’m going to make it a point to make sure crickets can be heard in the background. :-)
At any rate, I tried something different and learned something new. Maybe I’ll try it again some time! :-)