Over the past year and a half, I have driven back and forth
between Massachusetts and Pittsburgh almost ten times. It’s eight hours each
way, so I’ve logged somewhere around 160 hours in the car. Feeling totally
burnt out on music lately (I can’t take learning about another new wispy-voiced
Indie-band) I’ve become addicted to This American Life, Radiolab, and The Moth.
Especially Radiolab, and I don’t think it’s any wonder that the show’s
producer, Jad Abumrad, received a MacArthur Genius Award this year. The show is
absolutely brilliant—not only do they share the most peculiar science stories
(origins of the AIDS virus, human/animal communication, HeLa cells…) but they
relay them in such a way that the stories seem to…evolve. There’s something
about an audio show that’s completely nonlinear—the various voices, ambient
sounds, music, all the little tech-y editorial decisions like fading, phasing,
looping, and amplifying are all a part of the narrative. Much like a soundtrack
in a movie creates tension or heartache at just the right moment, all of the
details in an audio show are working in similar manner to have an effect on the
listener. The experience of listening to so many such stories over the past
year and half have begun to make me feel like I haven’t been hearing these stories, rather I’ve been absorbing them. Sometimes I’ll even find
myself suddenly remembering a clip of dialog or narration, and I’ll have the
hardest time remembering why I know it. Eventually I’ll be able to trace it to
another piece of dialog, and then back to the story. It’s something that
doesn’t happen after reading a book—I usually remember a text as a whole.
Just as the experience of hearing a story is very different
from reading it, adapting a story for audio is completely different than
writing. Even more so than I thought before I began this project. The story
I’ve produced for this class—my very first ever, so please be generous—ended up
being much less of a story than I initially intended it to be. This piece
evolved out of interviews with former steelworkers I collected for Peter
Trachtenberg’s Structures and Techniques class this semester, and the essay I
ended up writing for that class is an altogether different beast. Whereas there
I could subtly draw a metaphor between the nonprofit Rivers of Steel’s mission
to commemorate Pittsburgh’s industrial past with the idea of folklore vs.
fakelore (essentially, the fabrication of folk heroes), there was no such room
in this piece for such subtlety, and I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
In this piece you will find no fakelore and folklore. But you will hear more
voices than I was able to incorporate into the essay. In the essay, I just
couldn’t find a place to include Joe Karpieniak, but in the audio piece he fit
in perfectly. Such decisions were actually easy to make—each choice came
naturally to each medium.
The steel industry isn’t material that I’m naturally drawn
to. But what I noticed about the interviews I had collected was the voices of
these guys. There’s so much character in them. I can’t really express in an
essay the way Ron Gault would raise his voice to talk over the din of the other
restaurant patrons, or how the way he never paused in his speech said something
about his character, about his military-man persona. Same with Manny when he
speaks wistfully about his former blast-furnace employees. So in the end I’m
completely grateful I collected this material.
With all the talk this semester of multimedia storytelling
and how it’s not a bad idea, as Tim and Laura said in their presentation, to
have one form to specialize in, I can really see audio becoming my medium. It is
hard. Very hard. It’s so utterly particular. You have to be extremely patient
and listen to little two-second clips over and over again to catch the place
where it’s glitchy. But I never got bored doing this project. I realize that I
still have a lot of rough transitions, that some of the levels are off, that I
probably could have cut out portions of dialog that went on for too long (but
it was hard to find a place to cut these guys off!). And then there’s the
larger issues of the piece—it was really hard to make it a start to finish
narrative. But revision is completely different when dealing with audio. I’m
the sort or writer who writes on and on until I get it all out, and then I go
back and rework it into something. I revise with fury. But that gets really
complicated with audio, and I realize if I do this again (which I plan to) I’ll
have to become much better at mapping everything out ahead of time. I did this
to a certain extent, but I should have been much more exact with it. I really
like to listen as I go, but I hope with practice that I’ll become better at
envisioning what certain clips and transitions sound like together.
And then there’s the whole my-own-voice issue. I’ve always
cringed hearing my own recorded voice. I’m getting used to it. I realize
sometimes I get a little droney, or my voice is choppy, or I sound like a
stiff-voiced NPR reporter or worse, like a high-schooler doing a school project
and imitating a stiff-voiced NPR reporter. Again, practice. It’s really hard
sounding natural, and nothing sounds more unnatural to me than practicing
sounding natural. The voice is a funny thing. If only we could all sound as good
as Ira Glass (who has shared some of his own awkward early interviews, so this
gives me hope).
And finally, the technology. I recorded everything on an
Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder. Files were downloaded as MP3’s and dragged
into Audacity (it's free!). This was my first time working with Audacity—okay, with any
audio editing program—and it was fairly easy to figure out. It’s a little
clunky, but the commands are more and less intuitive once the basics are
figured out. The worst part is the size of the files. Audacity saves projects
as .aup files, and they can be up to several gigs. The program crashed many
times while I was working on this—mostly when I imported two-hour long
interviews. The next time I interview I’ll be sure start new recording sessions
every half hour or so, maybe even more frequently, because dealing with really
long pieces (especially if only using five or ten minutes of it) becomes
cumbersome, and even risky. I know there are other simple audio-editing
software out there, like Fission, which could be helpful in the future for
doing some of this preliminary splicing work. Once I had the piece where I
wanted it, I exported it as an MP3 file. In this process all the tracks (I had
somewhere between twelve and fifteen while working in Audacity) are merged into
one. Once it’s re-imported back into Audacity they can’t be separated any more.
As we can’t upload MP3s to our blogs I’ve uploaded the piece
to Mediafire. It’s
about 35 MB.
All the Best,
Amanda
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