Podcast

Interested in hearing about how remote schooling has affected students firsthand? Check out my podcast on student’s perspectives on the effects of remote schooling, and their feelings about returning to a more traditional, in-person teaching style.

Reflection on Podcast Process

While I dont think the podcast is necessarily my most polished project, my podcast is what I am most proud of since it was probably the most challenging of all my projects. Audacity crashed and deleted a good chunk of unsaved edits, so I got lots of practice with editing and layering sound. I learned how to fade sounds and music in and out, adjust speed and pitch, crossfade, and (mostly) seamlessly cut some speaking parts while blending others together. I’m most proud of it because it was the most difficult for me technologically and with writing, since I’ve never made a podcast before, but I feel like it came out a lot better than I expected.

The most challenging (and rewarding) aspect of using Audacity was the editing. I made music clips fades in and out, adjusted my voiceover track speed and then pitch to make it faster but sound normal, and cut the interview audio that I did not want to include.

This screenshot shows probably my least smooth transition to a newly added section of my voiceover. If you pay attention, you can tell the section where I say “… over zoom or otherwise…” is added, because the audio is slightly louder and less clean (you can tell the highlighted section is slightly louder in the screenshot by seeing the comparative height of the audio). To add this section to the original section of voiceover script, I recorded it separately and then copied and pasted this recording into a pause in my original voiceover. I did this type of editing many, many times throughout my podcast, but usually I blended the audio so it was much less noticeable.

In this screenshot, you can see how I blended the music into my voiceover track by starting it while my voiceover was still going, and using the fade in and fade out tools in Audacity to slowly introduce and then discontinue the music. Additionally, I quieted the original music track so as to be less of a distraction to the voice audio.

I had to organize the audio into specific tracks. For example, I had an interview track where interview bits from different interview were all gathered on one track, a music track where all music was placed as well as sound effects, and a track with only my voice with the podcast voiceover. While my voiceover audio remained on the top track throughout the whole process, the music and interview tracks ended up getting switched a little ways through the podcast. I put sound effects on the same track as music

This screenshot shows where in my podcast I accidentally started putting interview audio (pink/red) on the music track, and the music audio (blue) on the interview track. The tracks remained swapped from here to the end of the podcast.

After Audacity deleted 4 hours of editing, I had to rethink my podcast and do less editing. However, I also ended up shifting the organization of the podcast a bit. I had to add some unscripted transitions since the interview bits used were moved around a bit to make the podcast quicker to edit while still having a nice flow. But in overcoming these challenges and finding solutions to work with my timeframe, I felt accomplished and successful. Completing my podcast was the most difficult, but also the most rewarding.

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ur5Q6w2z0D60ZPqN7WBKrsJrYO2gXT1P/view?usp=sharing