It’s my first go at making a radio bumper, and I used Logic and its built-in software instruments, together with the default text-to-speech voice on my Mac (“Daniel”). Despite its very short length, I found it quite difficult to produce something with the right balance, focus and clarity. It is my first try anyhow, and I hope to improve my skills in future, so it’s good practice and I’m learning a lot!
In the meantime, I’ve been learning a little more about ethnography as part of the EDC course. Another thing that inspired me to take part in the radio bumper assignment during my micro-ethnographic study of ds106 was this podcast with anthropologist Tim Ingold. As he puts it:
‘With anthropology, the university in which we study is the world itself….in anthropology, we actually treat the world as a great big university. We don’t make studies of people, we study with them and learn from them.’
I’m certainly learning a lot from taking part in ds106, and from your assignments, and am looking forward to learning more as I explore and study with you further!
This is my response to the Create a Radio Bumper assignment. I had to create a short radio bumper for the Ds106 radio station. When I hear the term “bumper,” the first thing I think of is cars, so it only made sense to base the bumper around that. I started with a car crash sound sample. I recorded my voice and the bass with Reaper. The drum samples were made with MT Power Drum Kit, a MIDI instrument that simulates an acoustic drum set.
So this Assignment was really cool. We got to create promo Bumbers for DS106 Radio. I really enjoyed this assignment.
I instantly knew what music I wanted. Things They Do, By The Roots.This was a song from my childhood that inspired me to start writing music and prose myself. A decision that has brought me many great things in my life.
The idea of DS106 made me want to go inspirational, considering that’s what the class is all about. I figured whats more inspirational than Dr. Martin Luther King‘s, I Have A Dream speech. Though the whole speech is iconic I felt the first statement from Dr.King said it all.
My classmate Sean, pulled a good quote from the movie, Coach Carter, starring Samuel Jackson and we topped it off with a little Rocky. Inspiration for all Generations.
I did the voice over myself and had a pretty good time fulfilling one of my childhood dreams of being, “that deep voiced guy on the radio.”
All in all the assignment was really fun and i’m glad we got to do it.
“Now that we have a #ds106 radio up and running creating a 15 to 30 second bumper for the station. What is a bumper? It is a short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(broadcasting)). So for ds106 it should certainly include “DS106 Radio” and some sort of message about the station with voice over music.-Submitted by: Jim Groom
So this bumper was pretty easy to create. I mashed up myself saying “ds106 radio”, “Clubbed to Death” by Rob Dougan, and some crazy radio static, just not exactly in that order. The beauty of audacity is that you can layer these things and play with your own recordings. I played with some effects on [...]
Ira Glass has three things you need to be likeable on radio: firstly, a soft, intimate voice that makes you feel like he’s talking directly to you across your kitchen table; secondly, the humility to discuss his own work as something not innately brilliant, but as the culmination of many years of hard graft; and thirdly, a brilliant ear for wonderful, personal stories that make for compelling listening.
This American Life, which I’d never listened to before this week, is a kind of Reader’s Digest on the radio – that is, a sweetshop of tasty morsels, none of which you’d never planned on investigating, but which seem to fascinate nonetheless.
In the episode we were asked to listen to this week, about storytelling, or more specifically, reruns, the framing is classic Ira. Act one is all about action and the Beaver trilogy, a film in which the film maker became obsessed with returning, over and over, to the same subject. The story is gripping because we hear the journalist, the film and the film maker, Trent Harris, all narrating slightly different parts of the narrative. I found the act slightly long-winded, but by the end the effect is that I really wanted a happy ending for hte beaver kid, just as Trent and the jounralist do. I learned that good radio stories are involved, and take the reader on a journey, using the sequencing that Ira references in his video.
I enjoyed the second episode more, perhaps. about couples rerunning each others’ stories – what do relationships do to you and your stories? Despite the journalist speaking to a number of spouses who claim to have heard their partner’s stories over and over again, we find that they don’t in fact tell authentic, accurate versions of their stories. Hearing them realise this is entertaining, and the contrast between the voices is enough of a cue to the listener to expect different angles. Of course there’s also a lot of work behind the scenes to uncover some wonderful stories – as Ira says, the art of good journalism is as much about knowing what to take out as much as to keep in.
Discussion in Act Three of how often the Rosa Parks story has been evoked to explain revolutionary behaviour in many different contexts is an example of ineffective storytelling – where the simile isn’t really apt. But it’s a good example of how the collective subconscious that Jung talks about gathers experiences into each of our memories so we feel like Rosa Parks, for example, is an ancestor of ours when we make a stand. Choosing a person that means something to people can help them find a hook for what you’re telling them.
I have just completed the “Audio Assignments” section of my free online Digital Storytelling DS106 course and I have learned two very important facts. Having struggled through the creation of a 14 minute radio interview, I now have the utmost respect for the technical wizards who work “behind the scenes” to craft a radio show. Secondly, I have a new-found appreciation for the power and possibilities that Audacity, the free Macintosh, Linux and Windows audio editor and recording application, has to engage students in K-12 classrooms. With its wealth of online resources and support, Audacity should be a standard classroom and student application.
My “Interview/Music Mashup” audio assignment followed the Dickie Goodman interview style. Feeling that it was important to share the powerful ideas and learning that is associated with the DS106 phenomenon, I decided to create an investigative radio interview. I directed 20 probing questions at two “anonymous” DS106 students and they, in turn, answered with relevant snippets from popular songs.
The K-12 Perspective
What have I learned during this exercise that might apply to K-12 students?
First, and foremost, students today are engaged when they use technology to support their learning. The fact that Audacity is a free, open source application (that runs on a variety of operating systems) means that students can install this application on their home computers and work on an audio assignment outside regular school hours.
For example, I’d recommend that students be required to collaborate with partners as they produce audio assignments such as the following:
Social Studies students might create a campfire talk between Radisson and Groseilliers as they discuss exploration and fur trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Can you hear the cracking fire, the loon and the wolves howling in the distance?
What would two privates, who are in the front line trenches preparing to go “over the top” during World War I, talk about? Imagine the sound effects of battle that could be added to enhance the realism.
Two students could compare and contrast a poem or novel in a Language Arts class.
Music students might make a recoding of a duet together with an added “Extra Features” section which outlines the learning journey that they went through in creating the musical recording.
Science students might create an audio interview where they ask questions of scientists such as: Archimedes, Marie Curie, Einstein, Euclid, Galileo, Frederick Sanger or Jonas Salk.
Students who are interested in sports, might create an interview where they dissect a recent game and compare and contrast different coaching styles and player performance.
Regardless of the audio assignment chosen, I think that all students should include an “Extra Feature” that outlines what they learned during the activity, what they might do differently (if they were to select this same project again), and suggestions and tips for future students.
As an educator you would not want your students to upload their .mp3 formatted audio assignment to a web server. However, students could still transfer their home-created audio files to a USB memory device and bring them to school where they could be shared on a CD or showcased from the teacher’s computer behind the school’s firewall.
Regardless of the subject-specific learning opportunity presented to students, I can assure readers that using Audacity together with technology to tell a particular story is a powerful and engaging educational process.
The DS106 Perspective For me, this audio assignment opened up an entirely new way of telling a story. True, I have used Audacity in past but I have limited my use to a very simplistic process. For example, in past, I simply recorded my voice and added any additional audio into the single, primary audio track in the Audacity application. However, this assignment challenged me to use multiple tracks for the announcer’s questions, the vocal snippet replies, and the the musical interlude. I even played with a robotic modification of the two student’s responses to preserve their anonymity.
I began by roughing out an interview script where I identified “20 questions” (based on the old radio show of the same name) that I thought might highlight some aspect of the DS106 phenomenon. I then searched YouTube for songs that I though might contain lyrics that would apply to some aspect of the DS106 experience. I must admit that I spent a great deal of time searching for the right music tracks. Furthermore, it is often necessary to listen to the entire song to find the most appropriate lyrics or the section where the audio is clearest. Unfortunately, during this time consuming process, there were many songs that were considered but rejected.
One thing that I would like to see is an efficient way to search for all songs that contain a specific word or phrase. For example, when I was searching for music that would help share with listeners the time commitment that students may invest in DS106, the only song that came to my mind was Jim Croce’s “Time in a bottle”. Although the word “time” was in the title, Jim’s lyrics did not help me portray how busy students can be with this innovative DS106 course. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to efficiently search a comprehensive data base containing all the lyrics to popular songs. If you the reader can suggest a search technique to find possible lyrics and music, I would be very much appreciate if you could share your strategy through a comment at the end of this post.
In past, I would have began this assignment by recoding the first interview question into Audacity and then adding the appropriate musical segment as an answer. I would then continue repeating these two steps, which might span several days, until all 20 questions and answers were mixed to my satisfaction. However, knowing that on subsequent days, I would have difficulty making certain that the audio levels and that my microphone position were in the exact same location, I was concerned that there would be a noticeable difference between questions.
In order to maintain the same audio “balance” between all 20 questions, I decided to record the interview question track all at the same time. I had my script written out and I simply read out each question and left a three second placeholder interval between questions. Once I saved the respective Audacity project file (e.g. “interview-V1.aup”), I then could add in an additional track containing the vocal lyric answer which could be slid along the timeline and tweaked to fit into the respective “placeholder interval”. Knowing how much effort I was putting into this assignment, I made certain to save my “creations” on a regular basis. I used my traditional “version” naming convention and simply increased the “version value” each time I added a new lyric reply to a new question. This process allows me to save filenames as: “interview-V1.aup”, ”interview-V2.aup”, “interview-V3.aup”, etc. Should a “hiccup” occur, I can always go back and retrieve an earlier version to continue my work.
Extra Features
My tip to others who wish to create a Dickie Goodman-style interview using Audacity with musical lyric replies is to pay very close attention to the “sampling rate” of all components. Where possible, it is best if all audio portions can have the same sample sampling rate.
For example, when I started recording my main 20 question track into Audacity, I simply proceeded using Audacity’s default sampling rate which was set at the 44100 Hz level. In Audacity, one can set this sampling rate from a low of 8000 to a high of 96000 Hz. Obviously the quality of the recoding, together with the audio file size, increases as the corresponding Hz value increases. However, when I started acquiring my musical lyric replies, I failed to notice that most of these audio snippets had a slightly higher sampling rate of 48000 Hz. It was only when I was part way though blending these musical replies, that I noticed a particularly familiar snippet seemed to slow down and change in pitch when it was mixed with my primary 20 question track. It was then that I noticed the difference in the sampling rate between my question recording at 44100 Hz and the musical snippet at 48000 Hz. I explored all avenues and could not find a way to reduce the sampling rate on the individual musical replies without distorting the melody. So I continued blending my lowered sampled interview questions with the higher and more precise audio snippets. Once the final mixed interview track was completed at 44100 Hz, I simply re-saved the entire file at the higher 48000 Hz level which preserved the original melody speed and pitch. Unfortunately, this “tweak” sped up and slightly changed the pitch of my interview and any other components that were originally introduced to the mix at the lower 44100 Hz level. Once the remix interview was completed to my satisfaction, I used Audacity to export the project file as an .mp3 file which I uploaded to SoundCloud for sharing.
My recommendation is that you first open the song snippets or any other audio tracks in Audacity and determine the sampling rate that applies to most of the audio components. Once this value is established, start Audacity and change the default sampling rate so that this application will work without “hiccups” because now all your audio components will be utilizing a common sampling rate.
Lastly, but most important. In this musical mashup interview, I have used snippets from the following tunes listed below. In order that I might demonstrate the educational fair use of such music, I have purchased individual tracks for each of these songs on my iTunes card.
In the Mood – Glenn Miller
Magic – Olivia Newton John
You Really Got A Hold On Me – Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
I Heard It Through The Grapevine – Marvin Gaye
The Reverend Mr. Black – The Kingston Trio
Who Let The Dogs Out? – Baha Men
I’m So Excited – The Pointer Sisters
Just My Imagination – The Temptations
Makin’ It Work – Doug and the Slugs
Eight Days a Week – The Beatles
Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? – Chicago
Help – The Beatles
With A Little Help From My Friends – The Beatles
ABC – Glee
Let’s All Sing Like The Birdies Sing – Jay Wilbur & His Metropole Players
I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter – Nat King Cole
That’ll Be The Day – Buddy Holly
I’m Sorry – Brenda Lee
I’m A Believer – The Monkees
Taking Care Of Business – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
We Are The Champions – Queen
My Way – Frank Sinatra
Unfortunately, many of the songs containing the musical snippets may be more familiar to the “more experienced’ listener as opposed to our younger students. However, this fact should in no way diminish the power of using an audio interview to engage students in a powerful, new and exciting way.
Remember when I said I was happy to be done with design assignments? I’m about ready to say the same with audio assignments. Too bad I am not even close to being done.
Melodie, Lindsay and I are away from school for break which has been making the twenty minute radio show just a bit difficult to coordinate. Things are coming together steadily though. Mel produced an awesome bumper for our show, our commercial isn’t awful and the main segments are in the works. I have been using Audacity but still don’t have the hang of it completely. Our radio show preview is on SoundCloud but I’m not about to urge anyone to listen to it.
Lindsay and I are working on our segment together. We’re using a shared Google Doc to write and edit it. I’m not sure how things would have been different had we all been available to work on the show together but we’re doing the best we can!
RadiobumperDS106 by annie_belle1 This is my first-ever shot at making a radio bumper. I got the inspiration from this assignment posted by Jim Groom. I did some research, but I’m not 100% sure I understand what a radio bumper is. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a sound effect or a mash-up of [...]
Though I’ve been something of a stranger in the DS106iverse this time around so far, I have been thinking about the brilliant evolution of the course design – which Jim tells me is (at least part of) the genius of Martha Burtis. Specifically, I think the Assignment Repository is a glimpse of open classroom learning that simply establishes a framework for student/participant-choice and teacher/peer-facilitation that (much like the ds106.us site architecture and aggregation that I’ve written and spoke about before) I am eager to incorporate in my own classroom(s).
Which is where this post finds me, sharing not only my effort to produce a few Gleneagle Radio bumpers, but also a glimpse of the setup in this semester’s group of guitar students, who are able to fulfill their course work by choosing from a variety of assignments across several categories (and, if they don’t like what they find: go ahead and create their own). In addition to documenting their goals, and completed work on individual wiki pages attached to the class site, they are also encouraged to add their work to the corresponding Assignment page to create a repository of exemplars of the various projects, recordings and videos.
As we’ve made a habit of broadcasting from Gleneagle concerts, classrooms and other events, I hope that our school’s three guitar classes create ample fodder for our upcoming shows.
For my part, here are my first forays into the Bumper-business:
@cogdog, @jimgroom, @mburtis, @gardnercampbell, and maybe some other folks? – it was hard to tell – were broadcasting live from ELI 2011, and while the hotel WiFi was sketchy, some truth bombs were dropped, including the expression “love analytics” from Gardner Campbell. I immediately thought of a self-help book, and so crafted this fictional book cover in that style:
Thanks CogDog – I can’t wait for the audio.
Update: No audio forthcoming, but thanks CogDog for the original broadcast.
