audio authoring

This page contains links that may be helpful during the Bok Center Learning Lab's Audio Workshop for GENED1001 Stories From the End of the World.

For those who were not able to attend the workshop, here is the video of the Zoom meeting:

why audio authoring?

Typically, when encountering audio authoring, we think "podcast" or an audio essay of sorts. But across the wide array of projects you might tackle in the audio zone, the strengths of this modality in communicating academic ideas are numerous.

Creating an academic audio essay calls upon many of the skills, tasks, and creative engagement involved in writing a final research paper: it requires choosing a topic, conducting research, defining a point of view, considering relevant theoretical frameworks and providing supporting evidence for the argument.

Audio authoring a podcast or radio play also challenges you to develop new media skills and carefully consider how to use voice and narrative style to reach a particular audience. You will manipulate auditory elements (e.g. voice, sound effects and/or music) into a cohesive message, with intentional tone, style, and pacing. And crucially, making podcasts can help you integrate first-person perspectives and personal experiences with the questions/data/issues that are important for engagement with your discipline/subject matter, a move that you must contend with as you move between your academic and non-academic lives.

Even when composing a piece of music you must make intentional choices, where even the seemingly merely aesthetic elements are playing a critically functional role in your academic argument about the apocalypse.

tools

We can also help out with any questions you have about Logic or Ableton if you decide to go with one of those tools instead.

models

A radioplay of War of the Worlds narrated by Orson Welles.


99% Invisible host Roman Mars performing a podcast live on-stage, complete with music beds and recorded interviews. This is less in the apolcalptic theme, but a great model for doing an audio project "live."


some songs now!


For songs that explicate through lyrics some "end" include...

R.E.M.'s music video of "It's the End of the World as We Know It"


Messiaen’s quartet for the end of time

--- The Walking Dead soundtrack clearly leverages lots of Ligeti’s and Messiaen’s moves, hollywood-style. --- and then there's all the songs on [Ranker's list of Best Apocalyptic Songs!](https://www.ranker.com/list/best-apocalyptic-songs/lauriem)

For songs that EMOBODY the apocalypse, or elements of it: chaos, and feelings that are more subtle, etc..

Ligeti Lux Aeterna

and Ligeti Atmospheres

These two are sort of in between the transition between worlds, the feeling of unsettledness, of grasping for solid ground…the first here is a choir, the second an orchestra. The first perhaps a little more the beautiful side of being in the in-between, the second more the disturbing side.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

As you begin to create your own podcasts, here are a couple of resources to check out:

QUESTIONS

If you have any questions after the workshop, or at any time during the production of your podcast, feel free to reach out to use at help.learninglab.xyz and we will put together a customized tutorial for you.