So, my daughter pointed out to me as I recorded this audio that it will be interpreted as racist or discriminatory or anti-something.

My answer to that is that this is nonfiction.

This is a phone conversation I had sometime back in 1997 or ’98. I wrote the dialogue as true to my memory as possible. The greatest difference is that the caller was female, which I couldn’t re-create in Audacity (also, my phone number was different then, but I don’t remember it).

I was a young Marine at the time. I later learned that the person who wrote the check was another Marine who also lived on Quantico but belonged to another unit. He picked my number at random, then started bouncing checks all over the local area, writing my phone number on the checks. When the police did contact me, we straightened everything out and I encouraged them to prosecute him to the fullest extent because, well, screw that guy.

So, in answer to my daughter’s accusation, how is one supposed to portray an event if one of the parties uses broken English? Am I supposed to change what they actually said? Am I supposed to omit information or not talk about it because one party was of a different ethnicity? I’m sorry, but the first option does not represent reality and the second is censorship. If anyone is offended by this post, I re-created this phone call to the best of my ability to be a true and accurate representation of an actual event. That’s not racist.

To create this audio file, I started by writing the full conversation out in MS Word. I recorded it with an audio recorder and imported it into Audacity. I copied each section of the ‘caller’s’ voice and pasted each into place on a second track, generating silence over them in the first track. I also generated a tone to ‘bleep’ out my phone number.

Highlighting the entire second track, I adjusted the pitch and tone of the voice, increasing the speed slightly and raising the pitch.  I downloaded sound effects for a ringtone and dial tone, placing them at the beginning and end.

Then, I exported the audio as an mp3.

I completed the conversation five star assignment! I chose a conversation between Frida and Anika in California. Frida and her husband joined a Community run by her brother, and this is a fairly long conversation between the two friends about how the Community became afraid of the color red. This was one of the most dramatic and interesting conversations in the novel, and it made me sympathize with Anika a lot more. This conversation is on pages 224-231 for those of you who have the novel!

I’ll just say that this audio tape took a lot of different recordings simply because I had to split it up every time someone new talked so that editing pitch would be a lot easier! Here are a few of my scattered files! I came up with a numbering system (Frida is always the first number, so Frida1, Anika1, Frida2, etc is the correct order) and this made editing so easy!

I used QuickTime Player to record, and of course it saved in a m4a file (which I had never even heard of before now) and Audacity was being funny about it. I had to Google how to convert the files to mp3, and luckily I could quickly use iTunes to complete this unexpected task!

To make the conversation sound like two different people (well, three if you count Burke’s single line) I changed the pitch. I always saw Anika as more masculine than Frida, so I kept my original voice for her. I increased Frida’s pitch by 10% to make her sound like someone else. This was simple to do on Audacity once I learned how.

I went into this assignment expecting to spend about half an hour creating a two minute conversation, but I ended up spending two hours creating a 8.5 minute clip! I did add some sad music during one of Anika’s longer stories and some chatter at the end to signal why they stop talking (they can’t talk when other people are around), but I otherwise did not add sounds. A key part of their relationship is that they both wake up before everyone else to bake together. It is dark and silent, so I wanted their voices to be the main focus.

This assignment finishes up my twelve stars for the week, and it is my favorite one by far! You can listen to my creation below!

Note: If for whatever reason you can’t listen to the embedded audio, listen here instead!

For my second audio assignment I had a phone conversation with myself. I used Audacity to record my conversation and change the pitch on “one of the people” in the conversation. My biggest challenge was keeping the pitch change consistent throughout the track.

For the Have a phone conversation with yourself (4 stars) I did just that… I went outside (I really didn’t want anyone overhearing this, they would think I was crazy) and recorded a very mundane conversation not unlike the ones my fiance and I have all the time lol, then I played around with the pitch to make it sound like two different people. Enjoy!