For the re-mediating assignment, I chose to work with a comparative essay that I wrote for my English 125 class. This essay compared two versions of Kanye West’s song “All Falls Down.” I knew that I wanted to re-mediate it into an audio essay with actual sound clips from the two versions of the song. However, I did not know what the appropriate program to use because I have had no previous experience with this. After doing some research, I decided to use Garage Band. While I did find that it was fairly simple to use, I had a hard time deciding what the best way to incorporate the music would be.
The first step for me was creating a “script.” This script basically color coordinated the various words or lyrics to indicate which version of the song I would be playing. I wrote down the exact time that each of the lyrics appeared in the song, which made it easy for me to cut the music. The next step was recording my own voice, which was actually harder than expected. At first, it felt unnatural to read so slowly and pause between sentences and paragraphs. Each time I listened to the recorded I felt myself cringing at the sound of my own voice. The most beneficial part of this process was realizing that parts of my essay did not sound good when said out loud. Some sentences sounded very wordy, and others did not seem like they were explained well enough. I think this could be a valuable tool while editing my final papers.
The last step in creating my audio essay was piecing together my voice recordings with the music and making sure that it flowed effortlessly. This project was much more time consuming than expected, but this was mostly due to my lack of experience with using Garage Band. Once I got the hang of it and became more comfortable listening to my own voice, it was much easier. I was actually really pleased when I listened to the final version of the audio essay. It gave the paper a completely different feel and created an interesting contrast between my own voice and Kanye West’s.
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