School of Rock revisited – weaving a tapestry of audio

Having completed the project of editing the multimedia seminar recordings, I felt ready to attempt producing my first audio story. This meant either finding a new subject to record or trying to salvage an audio story from the material recorded at the rock and roll workshop. Family matters had prevented me from recording the concert at the end of the two-week workshop, so I knew I was missing the logical story ending. Upon listening again, however, I decided the material had possibilities, both for story and for exploring Audacity beyond Cut, Paste and variations on “Repair.”

Even though I had only captured half of the reporter’s interview with the two directors, I recognized that their easy banter provided material for the story’s narration. Finding the opening for the audio story was easy. One director recounted how he came up with the idea for a workshop on rock and roll for young would-be musicians, then casually mentioned the idea to the city parks and recreation department. I broke up the interview with cuts from the workshop, using the Envelope Tool on a second track to fade up audio of kids wailing on drums and piano, beneath the voice of the first director and down again under the voice of the second director talking about how they worked so well with each other. From there, I segued into one of the directors laughing over the absurdity their committing to a public rock concert at the end of such a brief workshop.

That set the premise for the whole story. One of the directors described the structure of a workshop day and the value of the program. Beneath his voice I ran the steady beat of his drilling a class on rhythm. The rest was filled in with various components of the workshop, including one director’s frustration over an apparent lack of progress with his young rockers in light of having to be ready for their concert the following week.

The whole point of the story was the iffy prospect of that concert, but I didn’t actually have any concert audio – and thus, no ending for my story.

It took three weeks of emailing, phoning and face-to-face pleading just to get a copy of the recorded concert, simply due to the nature of top quality high school teachers at the outset of another school year: They’re very busy!

One of their students finally came through with a CD of the 20-minute concert. I wound up using the greeting to the concert crowd, then cutting down a song by one of the workshop bands to just under 23 seconds. That alone was a great learning experience, trying to blend together various brief cuts from the song “We Got the Beat,” and still keep the beat intact.

I punctuated the entire piece with one of the directors speculating over the next year’s workshop.

The completed audio story ran about 30 seconds over my three-minute target length, but as a story, it seemed to hold together very well. [To listen to the MP3 file, click on the boldfaced title: "Hillsboro School of Rock"]

In the course of the hours and hours spent editing this story, I learned quite a lot – mostly about practical work flow and the eccentricities of Audacity. I learned not to waste time trying to transcribe in order to remember tracts of audio, but to save (Export) usable segments and sound bites as small, separate files – all well tagged for subject and length. I learned to end each editing session by Exporting a copy of the project as an uncompressed file to backup Audacity’s .aup files. I learned that moving Audacity project files off the desktop and into folders often produced an intractable “Error opening file” message when I tried to open them later. I learned to use the Envelope Tool only on secondary tracks and never on the primary track. For whatever reason, when the Envelope was applied to the primary track, it could not be undone. Any subsequent attempt to Cut a selection in the primary track would collapse the entire track. I also learned to make an Audacity project-in-progress more stable by Exporting and Importing segments rather than Cutting and Pasting.

Perhaps I was finally ready to move on to my first audio-driven slide show production.

Audio editing – cut for content, paste for continuity

The multimedia seminar presentations recorded back in June yielded eight packages of audio notes between two to three minutes each – the results of hours and hours of edit time spent listening and cutting and occasionally shuffling parts around for continuity.

I learned how to listen not only for content, but for the connective remarks that gave context to each sound bite. I also learned about the discipline needed to keep cutting and cutting in order to achieve the two- to three-minute standard advocated at the seminar. The cutting process turned out to be the easier aspect of editing. The harder task came with trying to assemble the bits of audio into a coherent, finished piece with an opening, a development and a conclusion – the basic components of any good essay or story.

The set of audio notes I wound up with varied considerably in technical quality, mostly due to my ineptitude at recording.

One object lesson rose quickly above the rest: There is no point in gathering audio of poor technical quality, no matter how good the content.

To listen to the audio notes, click on the boldfaced titles.

• Rich Beckman on the future of newspapers – University of North Carolina professor of multimedia journalism talks about who our future (young) readers are and how we aren’t likely to attract them in our present condition.

• Dirck Halstead on the future of newspapers – founder and editor of digitaljournalist.com makes a case for the imminent death of newsprint and the life hereafter available to those newspapers.

• Tom Kennedy on the future of newspapers – managing editor for online journalism at the Washington Post discusses how newspapers can and must prepare for the future.

• Seth Gitner on getting started in multimedia – chief organizer of the NPPA Multimedia Summit and multimedia editor for The Roanoke Times outlines how individuals can help get their newspaper started in multimedia journalism.

• Rich Beckman on the new tools of journalism – details the importance of learning how to use the various tools available to journalists online.

• Jim Seida on audio gathering techniques – multimedia producer for MSNBC covers some of the basics in audio skill building [ironically, my worst audio technically].

• Rich Beckman on the role of the multimedia producer – lists the duties of the newspaper multimedia producer.

• Dirck Halstead on becoming a multimedia producer – advocates photojournalists becoming video producers at their newspapers, whether large or small.