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Audio

AUDACITY
AUDIO 1
AUDIO 2
COPYRIGHT
DELIVERING AUDIO
DIGITIZING AUDIO
EDITING AUDIO
ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR EDITING AUDIO
EQUIPMENT
FREEPLAY
GARAGEBAND
GATHERING AUDIO
EMBEDDING AN MP3 AUDIO PLAYER
PODCASTING
VOX POP
WIND NOISE


Cecil Schwalbe A great blue heron fishes on Isla Santa Cruz in the Galapagos.

AUDIO 1
Pick one of the following and listen to half an hour of great radio journalism. Write down a list of at least six qualities that make the audio great. How is a great audio story similar to a great print story? How are they different? Think about imagery, emotion, fresh angles, universal stories, command of English and intimacy. Marshall McLuhan called radio a hot medium because it’s intimate.

Be prepared to discuss in class the specific examples you found.

* The broadcasts are in English and other languages.

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AUDIO 2

PURPOSE
Hone you interviewing skills by writing interview questions with the goal of recording an interview and editing it into a cohesive story. The finished story should sound natural and be worth listening to.

READING
To prepare for the interview and the editing that follows, please read the following:

  • Interview Tips (one page of advice from Radio Diaries)
  • Sound in the Story (an excellent PDF from a Poynter Institute workshop)
  • Gathering Audio: A Practical Guide (by Brian Storm and Jim Seida)
  • BBC: Advanced Radio Tips
    Don’t let the word “radio” deter you. These simple lessons (written for school kids) are for everyone who works with audio, whether or not you ever go “on air.” It’s one page that will help you gather and edit better audio. Another BBC page teaches us a lot about handling the microphone, including when to use a condom (I'm not kidding).

BAD HABITS

  • Ums and ers
  • Uh-huh or other encouraging words while the person is speaking
  • Long, rambling questions and statements that never seem to stop and go on and on with the words tumbling over and over each other
  • Heavy breathing
  • Multi-part questions
  • Leading questions
  • Either-or questions
  • Editorializing

DETAILS
You typically only get once chance to interview someone for a story, so it is important to have a list of questions prepared for the interview. While you are always encouraged to go deeper into concepts that develop through the course of the interview, you should always be prepared to ask at least 10 questions.

REQUIREMENTS
Focus your 10 interview questions on something beyond basic demographic data (such as age, hometown, number of siblings) that will make a good story (see pages 1-6 of Sound in the Story). You could focus on ONE interesting or unusual aspect of your someone’s life or an emotional experience from the past. Has he/she traveled extensively? Studied abroad? Lived abroad? Grown up on a ranch? Served in Iraq? Held an unusual job or internship? Tried out for American Idol? Run away from home? Overcome an obstacle? Grown up with eight siblings or six step-parents?

All 10 interview questions should be

  • thought-provoking, meaning the interviewee will need to reflect in order to answer (be sure to leave time for an answer; see page 10 of Sound in the Story)
  • open-ended, meaning not answered with a “yes” or “no” (“Tell me about...,” “What did it sound like when...,” “How did it feel when...,” “What did it smell like...."; see page 11 of Sound in the Story)
  • short (see page 12 of Sound in the Story)
  • qualified by the respondent (see Gathering Audio: A Practical Guide)

To encourage people to tell you stories, look at Radio Diaries.

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Carol B. Schwalbe In search of dinner on Isla Santa Cruz, a flamingo stirs the water with its feet.

COPYRIGHT
IMPORTANT! Do NOT copy music from a CD and put it on your Web site, even if you just loop a short section. You may NOT use someone else’s music in your Flash movie “for educational purposes” either. Once you post that song on the Web, you have gone beyond the classroom (so the educational exception no longer applies).

EQUIPMENT
Mindy McAdams provides helpful information about small digital recorders, microphones and audio editing software.

Mindy updates this page often to provide links to specific equipment through Amazon.com. Make sure you check around to get the best price. Amazon does NOT always have the best deal.

GATHERING AUDIO
If possible, record in a sound studio using high-quality microphones. Usually, this isn’t possible, so you’ll often be recording interviews in someone’s office or on the street. A carpeted room works well. Stay out of the wind!

Let the subject do the talking.

Collect RELEVANT natural sounds, such as hammers, crowds, water, traffic, musicians.

Nod silenty and keep eye contact so the person you’re interviewing knows you’re listening. Do NOT say “uh huh” or “mmmmmmm.”

Hold the microphone. Do NOT move your hand.

Carry spare batteries.

DIGITIZING AUDIO
Read the J-Learning page that describes how digital sound is created by a process called “sampling.” You’ll learn important information about common digital sound formats (WAV, AIFF, MIDI, MP3) and common streaming formats (Quicktime, Windows Media, Real Media).

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AUDACITY

GARAGE BAND

EDITING AUDIO
When editing audio, always save a backup of the original file so you can go back to it if needed. Also save a copy of your edit. Keep it in a safe place. You can throw it away later.

Always listen with headphones—good headphones that cover your ears.

Try to minimize the following:

  • Background noise
  • Annoying breathing
  • Intrusions such phones ringing, doors closing or dishes clattering
  • Mistakes or stuttering by the speaker
  • Noises made by the speaker (moving, coughing, saying um and er)

J-Learning recommends the following to improve interviews while editing:


Cecil Schwalbe The yellow warbler feeds on insects and other arthropods, occasionally fruit.
  • Replace unwanted sounds (coughing, paper shuffling, phones ringing) with some of the silence you recorded before you did your interview.
  • Use background noise to eliminate repeated words, ums, ers and other distracting verbal tics. Many times you can also eliminate stuttering.
  • Add a few beats of background noise between words or sentences to increase intelligibility.
  • When moving from a voiceover to the interview portion of your audio, use fades (bring the volume gradually down to zero) and cross fades (bring the volume of one audio segment down while simultaneously bringing the volume of another track up to replace it) to improve the transitional moments.
  • For recordings with constant background noise (such as air-conditioning or other mechanical hums), try using the Noise Removal effect.
  • For recordings with large volume shifts between speakers or over time, use the Normalize effect to boost volumes to the same level where possible.

Practice with different MP3 export options in your audio editing software. Jot down the settings that give you the smallest file size that still sounds good. Numbers to use: 22.05 kHz (sampling) and 16-bit (bit rate) and mono (channels). The data rate might be 48 Kbps or 56 Kbps (96 is probably too high; 128 is definitely too high).

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WIND NOISE

To reduce wind noise in GarageBand, use the equalizer and adjust the slides to get as much of the wind out as possible.

if that doesn’t work, try combining the low pass filter and the high pass filter. Adjust the slides.

For a male voice, try boosting his gain a little using the speech enhancer male solo.

ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR EDITING AUDIO

Mary McGuire, who teaches online and broadcast journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, has posted a clear, concise list of guidelines for editing audio that all journalists can use.
In it, she answers questions about how to gather and edit audio for digital projects. What’s OK to cut or move? What’s not OK?

DELIVERING AUDIO ON THE WEB
To deliver audio online, upload audio files the same way you upload any other file. To keep things orderly, store all your audio files in a folder called (surprise!) audio.

A link to a stand-alone audio files (one that must be downloaded completely before being played) looks like this:

<a href="http://www.j-learning.org/audio/myaudio.wav">Click here to listen.</a>

Depending on the browser, clicking on this link either causes the browser to download the file or open the file within the browser window and play it.

You can also embed an audio file into a Web page by inserting a background audio track to a page or simply to giving the audio a physical presence on the page. To embed an audio file, use the following code:

<embed src="myaudio.wav">

J-Learning has more information on streaming audio files.

EMBEDDING AN MP3 AUDIO PLAYER ON A WEB PAGE

PODCASTING
OPTIONAL: Want to learn more about podcasting? Start with this Wikipedia article.

Killer Interviewing Tips for Podcasters

VOX POP (The Voice of the People)
BBC produces these short, quirky tidbits on subjectssuch as boasting, nosiness and pronunciation of the word "scone."

Go to http://www.bbctraining.com/onlineCourse.asp?tID=2555&cat=2772

Click on Module 3: Interviewing for radio: The vox pop vault

Recording Vox Pops

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© 2008 Carol B. Schwalbe