Here is the final draft of my audio story for Project #4 for my DTC 201 class! You can also find it under the “Portfolio” section of this website.
The person I chose to interview for this project is my mom. The reason I chose to interview her is because she grew up in the 70s and graduated high school in 1981. The novel Ready Player One focuses a lot on technology and culture from the 1980s, so I figured interviewing my mom would be a great way to learn, first hand, about technology from this time. One thing I made sure to ask her was about video games during this time period. This was because Ready Player One is focused mainly on video game culture in the 80s. I thought it was funny when my mom brought up PacMan, because this game is featured in the novel!
After listening to the StoryCorps projects, I knew I wanted my interview to be personal. This is why I chose to include me asking my mom questions within my audio story. I also kept clips of us talking back and forth, including us sharing laughs a few times. Reading about StoryCorps, I really liked the idea of having something that maybe your great great grand kids could listen to one day, then be able to hear first hand what technology was like back then. It also could let them know what their three times great grandma sounded like, how she laughed, and how she told stories. I know I will definitely be able to save this audio story as a keep sake!
As mentioned above, I chose to interview my mom because the time she grew up fit perfectly with the theme of Ready Player One. Another reason I chose to interview her is because she is my mom, so I’m totally comfortable interviewing her and asking her questions. I thought this would give me a good quality recording, and it ended up working out perfectly. The initial interview was about 15 minutes long, which gave me a lot of content to work with and chose from! We sat in our dining room so it was quiet, and I used a recording app on my phone to record our conversation. This was also a good topic for us to talk about because we had never really had this conversation before.
To record the interview with my mom, I used an app on my iPhone called “VoiceRecorder.” I knew this was a reliable app and that I would be able to transfer the audio to Adobe Audition because I had used it previously for projects in my COM 210 class. The audio probably isn’t the highest quality, compared to if I used a high-tech microphone, but it was convenient and was accessible to me at the time.
I used an upbeat instrumental music tune in the background of my interview. I searched it through CretiveCommons, and downloaded it from SoundCloud. The music is under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license and credit is given to Twisterium. I wanted to add some upbeat music to my story because I thought it made the story more fun to listen to. The music is catchy, so I thought it would make for a more exciting listening experience. Here is the link to the file: https://soundcloud.com/twisterium/romantic-folk-loop-free-instrumental-background-music-creative-commons