Introduction
to
editing
podcast
audio
As a sound engineer at 680AM once told me, it's difficult work making
your interviews sound good. When someone is interviewed, they
tend to
add verbal pauses (uh, um, you know), stutter, mumble, talk over
someone else, and other things that might go on in normal speech, but
won't do on the radio because it's impossible for listeners to ask
someone to start over. It's the job of the editor to edit those
distractions out.
When you're writing and performing scripts (or interviewing!), the same
issues remain, and you need to know how to edit them out. For
this assignment, we're going to be making a recording of us reading a
book in the public domain. You will be assigned a section of
this
semester's book during class to read.
Note that since this is all your work, you can edit like mad.
That is, adding a word or rearranging speech could be questionable
ethically during an interview, which we'll do in a later
assignment. Here, you can find a misspoken word, cut it out, and
paste in your saying the correct word without any issue. We're
trying to get the script perfect, not maintain the integrity of an
interview or performance.
Guidelines:
- Read clearly
- Read with emphasis and feeling. Engage your audience
- Edit mistakes
Goals:
- Discover some of the pitfalls of editing spoken text.
- Get hands-on experience reading complicated scripts (and
understand what's difficult to read).
- Brainstorm ways of making your major audio assignment go more
smoothly.
- Learn how to use Audacity.
- Help your instructor assess how computer savvy we are as a class.
Librivox hints for successful reading -- http://librivox.org/about-recording/#reading
Configuring Audacity for Librivox readings -- http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/Audacity_1-2-3
Audacity tutorials -- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/tutorials.html
Audacity download -- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/