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.

Audio editing

I’ve discovered that audio editing takes an enormous amount of time. Not just in terms of the learning curve involved in getting acquainted with new software, but in the sheer time and concentration required for listening and relistening.

In terms of choosing which audio editing software to use, I settled very quickly on Audacity 1.2.6. It was recommended at the NPPA Summit, and it was free. I also had a 2004 version of the iLife’s Garage Band – and that may come into play in the future – but the obvious place to begin learning about audio editing was Audacity.

Along with the software and a plug-in necessary for dealing with MP3 files, I downloaded the online manual and every tutorial I could find, then printed them off for a “text” book nearly an inch thick.

Since I already had digital recordings of various presentations from the multimedia seminar, this seemed like good material to help me learn the basics of audio editing. I wanted to convert the lectures into brief sets of audio notes that could be “reviewed” quickly to keep myself enthused and focused.

Almost immediately my aging G4 Mac announced that its “startup disk” was nearly full and I should do something about that. Audio editing, it seemed, required a lot of memory, not to mention adequate processor speed. How would my Mac react when I finally got ready to put audio together with visuals? How would my wife react if I announced that I’d have to invest in more RAM, a bigger hard drive, and perhaps even a new Mac?

Well into the night and my shortest lecture file, it became clear that I also needed to develop a systematic approach to an audio editing project.

First and foremost, I needed to SAVE my work frequently to avoid having a lot of work wiped out by a disastrous software crash. (Audacity is reported to be very stable, so I presumed the occasional crash was due to the inadequacies of my computer.)

As for an overall editing strategy, I divided the task into three parts: 1) a rapid rough cut to select the parts I liked, then 2) a trim down session to tighten the selections as much as possible, and finally, 3) the fine tuning edit to even out the audio quality and smooth transitions between cuts.

Without this basic strategy, I spent a couple of hours boiling down a 30-minute presentation by Seth Gitner on “How to get started in multimedia.” The audio track revealed two immediate problems with the tiny Olympus WS-300 recorder: generally uneven levels of recording throughout the talk, and little patches of dead silence between the audible parts. If the speaker paused, the level of recording seemed to drop out entirely, then over-adjust its volume level when the speaker resumed, occasionally also dipping the volume with the leveling adjustment. The little silent gaps were easy enough to remove with the Select and Cut procedure, but I had to "Normalize" each swing and dip in the volume level of the recorded audio in order to obtain a consistent level for playback.

At the end of the evening, though, I had less than three minutes of audio notes – a nice, tightly-edited summary of what I wanted to remember from Gitner's presentation – in his own voice.

The trade-off was an uneasy feeling that what I wound up with probably could not be termed “documentary audio journalism.” It sounded “of one piece,” but was not. Most of the natural pauses for breathing were removed, as were inevitable pauses for thought, and initial sentences broken mid-sentence to be rephrased.

I even shifted some parts of his talk out of sequence, perhaps even out of context, in order to make more sense to my own ear.

Clearly, software for audio editing offered as many opportunities for manipulative abuse as software for photo editing.

The basic rule for the use of photo-editing software has been based upon prior experience: Do nothing to an image that you would not normally have done in the darkroom.

I had no prior experience editing audio. Where were the lines that should not be crossed?