Note: This post was originally composed for use in Professor Sharman’s Seminar 2 class in Spring 2013.
During our audio workshop, we’ll be discussing how to construct an audio narrative about a specific neighborhood. We’ll be drawing on resources from This American Life, a popular weekly radio show that thematically reflects on contemporary society.
In an episode from 1996 entitled “New Year,” host Ira Glass and teenager Claudia Perez introduce the listeners to 26th Street in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. We’ll listen to a clip from this episode to think through how Perez and Glass include details to build their location-based narrative. I encourage you to listen to the entire clip when you have the time. It runs from approximately 5:35 to 22:00 in the episode.
We will also watch and discuss the first part of “Ira Glass on Storytelling” where Glass introduces the two elements that he believes are essential when creating an audio narrative.
I encourage you to listen to the other three parts (roughly five minutes each) of “Ira Glass on Storytelling.” In Part 2, he reflects on the importance of giving yourself time to find your story and editing out the boring parts. In Part 3, he talks how it’s hard to get an adequate reflection of your good taste in your early work, and he analyzes the problems in one of his earlier recordings. In Part 4, he details two common pitfalls of audio recording and how to avoid them.
More:
- If you need to check out an audio recorder, here’s a link to the MHC A/V Request Form: http://macaulay.cuny.edu/community/doit/av-equipment/. Note: you must make the request at least 3 days in advance and must travel to Macaulay to pick up the recorder.
- This episode of This American Life on mapping might be of interest to you after our last workshop: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/110/Mapping.
- Find more audio resources here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/make-radio.
- Find tutorials on Garageband here: http://www.apple.com/support/garageband/.
- How to upload and embed your audio: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/brooklynitfs/2012/12/05/uploading-audio-projects-a-note-about-plugins/
