I love the idea of playing with tone.  With video-editing, I’ve always enjoyed creating video mash-ups that significantly alter the tone of a movie (usually making something seem entirely more dramatic than it should be).  As such, the over-dramatic reading assignment naturally caught my eye.  Making anything over-dramatic generally entails looking for decidedly non-dramatic source material to create some nice contrast.  Thus, what better material to use than a classic children’s nursery rhyme?  I ultimately chose to use Itsy-Bitsy Spider, as when not sung, it becomes apparent that the spider’s story is somewhat epic.  I mean, being washed down a water spout is certainly life-threatening to a spider.  So I opted to read the rhyme (using Audacity to record the piece) in such a way as to emphasize this dangerous event and the subsequent triumph of the spider.  I essentially ignoring the song-like nature of the piece and down-play the built in rhyme, and emphasize certain dramatic words (washed, dried, again).  Overall this was a fun little exercise that outlined the importance of tone in any form of sound.

This monologue came out of an assignment that had you read something overdramatically. In order to do this, I looked through an archive of monologues and found this one from “The Chocolate Affair” by Stephanie Alison Walker. It sounded like something I could really get into, so I went ahead and gave it a try.

I recorded myself with Audacity about a hundred times before I thought I sounded over-the-top enough. (I’m no actor, so it took a lot of practice to just sound dramatic in general.) Afterward, to kick it up a notch, I thought I would support each narrated action with sound effects. You know, because that’s pretty overdramatic. So I downloaded a bunch of audio clips from Freesound and compiled them all in Audacity.

I think of all my audio projects this week, this one turned out best. I let loose a little to really get into character, so it was fun to just flail about. Adding sounds for extra flair made this sound into something different from the others, too, although organizing all that audio was a bit of a hassle. Still, I’m proud of how it turned out.

For one of my week four assignments, I chose to complete the Over-Dramtic Reading assignment that was submitted by Chris Randles.

The assignment is to, “Choose any written material (a song, poem, short book, excerpt from a novel, scene from a television show, news article, etc.) and record a dramatic reading. Read your selection in a way that alters the message of the original material (at an odd pace, overly excited, sad, etc. — be creative, make it your own). Make sure you mention what it is you are reading, and who the author of the material is.” The assignment is worth 1.5 points.

I chose to dramatically read Sam Smith’s song, Stay with Me. The song is very somber and sad and I made it very angry and mad. I recorded myself in Audacity and then saved the file as a .WAV. Once I was done, I uploaded it to my SoundCloud. Here it is…

I was a bit nervous while doing this assignment because I kept thinking I was going to cough and ruin everything. Luckily I was able to contain myself for the time being. I really liked this assignment because I found it kind of amusing. It really changes the meaning of the song without even changing the words. Kind of funny!

This audio assignment is for 1.5 stars.  This is my overly dramatic reading of a child’s poem.

I have owned a Nissan Xterra for over 7 years. It has been pretty good to me. When looking around my pile of incredibly boring reading material, I came across the old 2007 Xterra Options catalog and felt that I could certainly over dramatize something out of this! So I chose the section on off road traction and let her rip. I used Audacity to record this track, I posted it on sound cloud, and then shared it and tagged the heck out of it. It made me want to buy a new Xterra, but I think this one will last me a while longer.