For this weeks tutorial, we listened to an audio piece that was broken up into scenes. It followed the stories of several people in a Hotel in Hong Kong. As a whole, it was an experimental piece using things like repetition and metaphor, yet after analysing it as a class, I found it to be very creative in conveying certain characters or events. The first few scenes suggest someone checking into the hotel, someone who is transgender or as a man who prefers to be a transvestite, as well as a group of Agatha Christie fans coming together for some kind of convention. For this particular scene I found myself to be so impressed with the use of a metaphor along the lines of, “Agatha Christie is loose in the hotel”. Without giving very much context as to what is truly going on, as a listener in the present day we gather that Christie is not actually in a hotel room in Hong Kong, due to the fact that she passed away in 1976, but rather what remains of her work and ideas; Her fans.

Something else that stuck with me was the line “Somewhere, something else it going on”. Although a very simple and perhaps very obvious piece of dialogue, thinking about the different scenes that occurred, I felt that this connected them perfectly. The man who shaves himself and dresses as a women was raised as a man, however on the inside, there is another truth. Whilst that occurs, Agatha Christie is loose in the hotel! and so on and so forth….

This piece communicated the importance of not treating your audience as though they need everything simplified and obvious for them, due to the fact that they do not have any visual cues of metaphors when listening to an audio piece. Dialogue can be very important here and as Kyla mentioned in a previous lecture, this medium is great for things or moments that you cannot see, e.g a realisation or feeling.

For the remainder of the tutorial, we went back into our groups and looked at the audio program adobe audition. Liam taught us some basics about editing audio, which I was surprised to find were quite similar to premiere pro in the cutting tool, import/export settings and several others. We also had a look at the mic’s that we were going to be using and got started on a technical audio exercise. Looking at the prompt “Can I have your attention” our piece was based on a mixture of sound effects, narration, dialogue atmosphere, spot sounds and music (non copyrighted).

We asked people how often they are on their phones, as well as what social media they used, due to this being something that we as young people will tend to focus our attention on. Other sounds were recorded, including a text message “ding” as well as a notification sound etc. This was a really useful exercise as it gave us some practise with using our equipment as well as editing for the final assessment.