Digital Project 2: Sound Composition
A creative exercise in speculative media development
test and choose audio recording tech by Tuesday 9/10
due: Tuesday 9/24 by 11:59pm
In the spirit of Orson Welles’ accomplishment in his 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, your task with this assignment is to select a segment from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to re-create and develop as an audio experience, and adapt it to make it sound plausible, that is, consistent with our reality and/or with the world of the novel.
To be successful with this assignment, you’ll want to balance your voice with special sound effects that you can generate yourself or adapt from sources on the web. You want to first locate some sound technology that will work with devices you have readily available–your mobile phone or tablet, for example.
Tech you need:
Options for sound recording:
- Mobile apps: GarageBand is a great option for iOS devices, and there are several good audio apps apps you can try for Android phones.
- Computers: Audacity is an old free, reliable cross-platform software with good documentation.
- Please export your file as an .mp3 , a standard audio format.
- Access and save to an online Box directory (on Pitt’s Box network) that I will create for each of you.
How to get started:
- Listen to Orson Welles’ radio production for a while to get some clues and ideas for sound effects to try.
- Select a short passage of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, perhaps part of a chapter that represents a complete, self-contained event, an event that you recognize could be developed in more detail or from another point of view.
- Work on adapting the descriptive language and dialogue (if any) in the text into something that involves voice cues and sound effects. You might start by copying the text into a file and editing it to add and alter material.
- Think of new content to add of your own to help develop this episode in a creative new way.
To be successful with this exercise, you must do more than simply read the text out loud. I will be looking for signs that you have altered it in at least two or more of the following ways:
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Make it sound plausible in our moment: Change events so that they resonate with something happening in our moment–something we can recognize from everyday news. (You might refer to current government officials or crisis events, or represent technology we are familiar with.)
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Or, make it sound plausible in the world of the text: Create your adaptation as if the time and setting of the text were real (for example, as if there had really been a World War Terminus, etc.) In this case, make sure that the sound effects and language are consistent with the rules of the world in the text.
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Create nonverbal sound effects Make the event sound as if it is live and happening currently, and make this as realistic as you can. For this you should actively seek out or create your own sound effects.
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Alter the language in the original: You might cut the language of description but don’t lose the substance of it. You might even change the events to make this adapatable to our moment. Do not change it so much that there is nothing recognizable to connect this with the original.
Your creative adaptation needs to build on or reply to the passage you chose, and it represents your interpretation of it.
Create and submit two files:
- Generate a sound-clip of your creative adaptation, and save it as an mp3 file. (Your sound-clip should be at least 3 minutes and at max about 10 minutes long. 5 minutes is a reasonable length.)
- Draft a short piece (a few paragraphs) documenting your decisions about what you selected and how you decided to alter it to help me understand what you’ve attempted to accomplish. This can be a text file or word-processed document, or a webpage or blog entry if you keep a blog and want to feature your work online.
Filenames: Use this format to name your files, to be sure they’re associated together.
- LastName_SFAudio.mp3 (for the sound file)
- LastName_SFAudio.txt (or .rtf, .doc, .txt, .html, for the reflective document)
File Submission: I’ll invite you to a Box directory where you can upload these two files by the time they’re due.