Category: AAD Community

Story Catchers Practicum: Week 8

This week Marsha and I met and mapped out the plan for the rest of the term. I will be focusing on finishing Alito’s story and cleaning up the audio for other stories. Marsha gave me about 10 stories to work on over the last few weeks. We will restart the index project next year and probably continue editing audio. I emailed Nancy and she is fine with the extended project timeline. She also complimented us on our index so far, so we are moving in the right direction! I recorded an intro to Alito’s story, but I still need to add music. Once I have done that, I will email KLCC about airing the story. At least we will have an example of an edited story to use for next year. I have sent Marsha the evaluation and she will be getting that to me when we have our last meeting next week.

The process of cleaning up the audio has really showed me what not to do when recording. For instance, it is really difficult to edit out loud sounds like coughs or interruptions. Some of these stories were recorded on a stereo mic with left/right speakers and some were on a mono mic.  Not everyone who used the stereo mic used it correctly causing one side of the mic to be really quite while the other is very loud. This is what happened for Wilma Crow and Twila Souers story. You can hear Twila clearly (as well as her breathing) but you can barely hear Wilma. This made it difficult to boost Wilma’s sound because it made Twila’s sound even louder. So, if Twila breathed into the mic or made any noise, it would drown out Wilma. So, I tried my best to boost the sound and reduce the noise, though there are some areas that it is impossible to fix without cutting out important info. However, KLCC did use this interview for one of their Eugene 150 spotlights. I listened to their story and the audio sounds decent. I’m not sure what they did to fix it. Perhaps they used their fancy normalizer algorithms. This being said, many of the stories that involve fixing the volume end up taking longer to edit than I expect. I still plan to finish the 10 stories next week, but it’s good to know for future planning. It’s always easier to record good sound than to edit later.

Story Catchers Practicum: Week 7

This week I focused on editing the stories Marsha gave me to clean-up. This has allowed me to hone my audio editing skills such as cutting and adjusting volume, so that I will be even more prepared for creating stories next year. Although many of the cds Marsha gave me where blank, which delayed the project somewhat. Hopefully we will meet this week to discuss this issue. I also emailed Nancy to check in on the indexing project. I have informed her that the indexing will probably not be finished by the end of the term and so we will have to pick it up again next year. I believe this will be fine since there was no set deadline. This will also give us time to perfect the audio of the collection.

In general, it’s pretty easy to use Audacity. I would like to eventually learn more its complicated features, but overall the program is intuitive. I’m not sure how many more stories there will be to edit, but I will hopefully finish those this term along with Alito’s story. I have not made the intro to his story yet, but I will be working on it this week. Then I can finally contact KLCC and get that conversation going for next year!

Story Catchers Practicum: Week 5

This week I continued indexing. We have now reached half-way! If we keep up with this pace, we will definitely be done with the index by the end of the term. I’m thinking I will send the current index to Nancy soon to check that it fits the library’s standards, so that we have time to edit if necessary. I also had a presentation from the Lane County History Society recently and I thought it might be a good idea to contact them to see if they would also want to hold this archive. I think the Story Catcher’s collection would be a perfect edition to their oral history archive. Plus, holding the stories at the Historical Society will legitimize the project and probably allow people interested in Eugene history to more easily find the information. If Marsha agrees, I will ask the Historical Society if they would want to house the archive.

I also met with my friend who showed me some audio editing techniques. We went over some simple functions of Audacity including cutting, boosting and importing. The process seems fairly simple. Audacity is mostly used for basic editing such us cutting out sound and adding simple effects. I learned that one difference between Audacity and more professional audio editing software like ProTools is that ProTools keeps the original sound file and adds onto it, while Audacity permanently changes the audio file in order to save space. I will be downloading Audacity next week and officially start editing! Since there is only 4 weeks of the term left, I am thinking that I may not be able to edit enough stories to start a program with KLCC. I’m thinking I will edit Alito Alessi’s story and show it to KLCC as an example. Hopefully, this will start a conversation for next year when I can edit stories more regularly for the radio. So, I’m thinking I will only edit one full story this term, but that I could spend the rest of the quarter cleaning up the stories before giving them to the library to be archived. This could give me good practice and is probably a better use of my time based on the timeline. This way we can at least get the project archived this year and then focus on getting the stories on the radio next year.