Gabby Sparro ENGL 339 Blog

    Three down, one more to go. That is a terrifying thought, but now is it is time to do a retrospective of Unit 3.      The second I was told this was going to make an audio essay, I immediately decided I was going to play fast and loose with the term "essay". Essays, at least my definition of them, are very serious and formal. I wanted my audio essay to be playful and fun. One of the first things I look into was if there was a way I could edit my voice to sound like an old-timey radio host. Luckily I found a youtube video with step-by-step instructions on how to. With this, I added a much longer introduction that is more of a comedy bit rather than a traditional essay introduction. I also cut out a few parts of my essay for timing and it felt too similar to parts of the essay that came before it.      First off, I know this is obvious, but I must say it: EDITING IS VERY HARD. The long hours of going through just a few minutes of audio. It felt ...

      You know that old TV trope of a character confidently sitting down to do a big project, so sure of themselves and two seconds later, the scene cuts to the character looking distressed surrounded by pies of crumpled paper? That was me with recording and editing.      I scheduled a 45 minute time period for my first recording session. I was not sure how long it would take to record. I figured I had more than enough time. I was there for two hours. I learned two things about myself that night. The first is I run out of breath way too easily and the second is that is when I read out loud, I take very long and awkward pauses. I kept reminding myself of the very first lesson about not hating the sound of my voice. It was very odd, hearing my voice in the headphones attached. It was louder than usual because of that. Still, I focused on my script and kept my voice level like the people in the other podcast we have listened to.      Afterward, ...

          Silence is an interesting concept in podcasts. The whole point of podcasts is that you hear it. You can't see the podcast host/performer so they have to convey their emotions and character through the sound. So how can a podcast use silence then? When first thinking about silence, I could not put how it was used in words. Then I saw this quote by  Heidi McKee:   “silence traces noise and noise traces silence in such an interleaving that there cannot, really, ever be a separation, hence the importance of discussions of silence in any discussions of sound”. It is like night and day, chocolate chip cookies and milk; you cannot have one without the other. This article as a whole illustrates that silence has no set use for it. Sure, you can use it the most common way, to create tension, but you can also use it to make jokes or transition into another scene. Both of these uses of sound are used in the podcast The Two Princes. In episode 4, Rup...

      Whenever a professor asks if the class knows the meaning of something, I tend to nod my head no. I like to get clear definitions in case the professor has a different definition. Though, when Dr. Gerding asked if anyone heard of remediation, my no was genuine. The word itself did not even seem familiar to me. However, once I learned what remediation actually is, it turned out that I have been using remediation for years.       One way you can use remediation is by taking another creator's creation and transforming it into something original. Normal people probably have a smart or sophisticated example of this. However, I myself am strange and unusual. So the first thing I thought of was fanfiction. Fanfictions are stories based on popular media and its characters. That are so many different types of fanfiction. There are in-canon fanfictions that follow the canon storyline as a way of predicting what happens next or changing some things that happ...

         Another day, another unit comes to a close. I am a bit sad about that because I really enjoyed this unit but I am also excited to see what happens next.      It was interesting working with an audio drama rather than a traditional podcast because of who they use the same things differently. For example, any type of podcast can use sound effects but audio dramas tend to need sound effects to make their stories more believable. When looking at the list of sonic rhetorical devices, I looked at what people would use to describe action movies rather than a podcast. This allowed me to focus on the positive aspects of The Two Princes that other podcasts don’t have, like dragons.      Going into this assignment, I figured that this would be just like writing any other essays for a class but instead of writing about a book, I'm writing about a podcast. I quickly learned that that was not the case. For one thing, it is harder to fli...