For my audio story, I decided I wanted to tell the story of a program at work in which I have a ton of respect for. I decided I wanted to tell the story of the Fort Drum CenteringPregnancy program. You can get a bit of an idea as to what the program is through my draft audio story.
As I already knew quite a bit about the program and had regular interactions with the program’s manager, much research wasn’t required to know what direction I wanted my story to take. I did do a little bit of research on typical prenatal doctor visits, of which I could compare with the Centering program.
Next, I contacted the program’s manager, Maj. Laurey Tyson, at the Fort Drum OB/GYN clinic, to arrange for the interview. Seeing as how I was already in the Maternity ward with my wife after having our sixth son on Tuesday, going across the medical campus to the OB/GYN department wasn’t a problem. I had to record the interview on my cell phone as I didn’t have my audio recorder with me.
After completing what turned out to be a relatively long interview with Maj. Tyson, I went to work on recording my narration based on the script I had drafted earlier. This time, I did have my audio recorder with me. However, after comparing the two recordings, I realize I should have used the same source for both recordings.
Now that I had all of my recordings complete, I began working on developing my draft audio story.
For my initial draft, I began by creating a new multi-track session in Adobe Audition in 16-bit at 44100Hz stereo. I then copied all of my audio files to the Files tab. I then double-clicked on my narration track, opening the track in editor.
I could then select specific parts of my audio using the “i” key and “o” keys to create ins and outs which I could then insert into the multi-track.
Once I had my first clip added to the track, I began cutting down on some of the portions which sounded awkward and used Fade-in and Fade-out to make my track sound smoother.
Then, I did the same thing with the portion of Maj. Tyson’s audio I wanted to include next. She had a few “ums” in her interview, so I cut those out and smoothed out the cut areas. I also used some of the background noise to help transition the ins and outs of the clip.
I then repeated the process with the rest of my narrations and interviews. I then realized I forgot to introduce Maj. Tyson when I recorded my initial narration, so I went back and recorded that part and inserted it into the multi-track.
Next, I wanted to make sure my audio gain matched as close as possible between the narration and the interview, so I played around with the audio gain on all tracks to make the bulk of the voice hit between -12 and -6 dB in the levels. After moving tracks around a bit to make them sound natural, and adjusting some of the fades, I finally had a final draft complete.
I then exported the file by going to File – Export – Multitrack Mix Down – Entire Session… Then, I uploaded the track to my Soundcloud account and embedded the track to my WordPress blog using the same methods as during last week’s tutorials assignment.
After reviewing some of the feedback on my draft, I decided it would be a good idea to add a little bit of music to help enhance the story. I found a royalty-free song that matched the mood of my story on BenSound.com. However, to add music at the beginning and the end of my story, I had to find a way to shorten it as it was already right at three minutes long.
So, I decided to re-record my narration; this time, using the same device I used to record my interview with Maj. Tyson. That way, the sound would hopefully match up a little better. I also shortened my narration by about 10-15 seconds, which gave me enough time on either end to add music to the piece.
After adding the music track, I used both the fade-in / fade-out feature at the beginning and the end.
I also helped make the volume transition sound a little more natural by adding keyframes at key points to ensure the music dipped at the right time when the narration began and vice-versa at the end. I then cut in my new narration the same way I added my narration during my draft, and I had a final product I was much happier with than my initial attempt. I hope you like it.
Music: https://www.bensound.com
