For my audio story, I chose to interview my mom about her experiences with technology. I made sure to ask questions related to Ready Player One. A few questions I asked included: Did you play any video games as a child, like Pac-man etc? Which ones? Where do you think technology is headed? What do you see life like in the next 10-20 years? Etc. I made sure to focus specifically on technology. In Ready Player One many video games were referenced from the 1980s. In my interview, my mom spoke about Atari, Pac-man, and Donkey Kong which were also things mentioned in Ready Player One. I also asked her how she saw technology in the future since Ready Player One is set in the future.
In the StoryCorps project, the interviews focus on stories people have about certain topics, their personal antidotes. In my interview, I included personal stories from my mom (about her grandfather and father) like they do in the StoryCorps project.
I chose to interview my mom because she grew up in the 1980s and is familiar with the time period of the novel. I asked her questions related to the novel as well as questions about technology in general. A lot of our conversation about technology was focused on technology in schools since both my sister and I are both in college. My mom is observing how technology is affecting our learning in college compared to when she went to WSU. I had a list of about 12 pre-written questions which I asked my mom. I then edited it down to fit within the time constraints as well as to create a smoother flowing story.
I was already familiar with Adobe Audition, so I knew the basics going into this project. I had also already worked with my audio recorder, so that made the process simpler and enabled me to focus more on the interview itself. In editing the interview, I first split up the track into individual segments where my mom answered a specific question. I staggered each segment onto a different line in Audition which helped me visualize as well as edit the track better. After I had chosen the tracks I wanted, I edited them individually, taking out long pauses or excessive filler words. I then put in music to the beginning and end of my story and made sure to fade-in and fade-out the music.
I decided to find creative commons music to introduce and end my audio story. I chose music that eluded to the sounds of a video game which I thought was fitting. I only added one sound to supplement my interview because I didn’t want the sounds to detract from the interview itself and I also wanted to follow in the footsteps of the StoryCorps project where they usually only use an intro and outro song.
Creator: Mativve
Title: Cheerful Song
URL: https://freesound.org/people/Mativve/sounds/391538/
Creative Commons License Name: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
Link to Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/