My chief emotion during this assignment was frustration. Frustration with WaveLab, frustration with myself, fortunately no frustration with Bee who was a delight.
It’s clear to me that if I want to succeed in this subject and in future endeavours I need to master WaveLab. That could be easier said than done since there are so few online resources. There were things I wanted to do with my audio piece – in particular, tidy fades to make the piece lest abrupt – that I simply couldn’t figure out how to do. Exporting my piece was another problem.
That said, I can’t lead a software-centred witch burning without acknowledging that also held myself back. I listen to a lot of radio documentaries but I realise that my listening has been mostly passive. I know what good radio sounds like but I haven’t focused on what makes it so good. In future, I’m going to listen more carefully and when something strikes me as really working I’m going to take note of it. Not to copy what they did, of course, but to understand how it works and why.
Another concern I have is around copyright and fair use. I did use music in the background of the piece and I’m not entirely convinced what I did was up to scratch. It’s something I’ll have to learn about very carefully and specifically and I realise that if my assignment infringes copyright I’ll have to take it offline.
It wasn’t all terrible. I knew I would have an interesting interview with Bee and I was excited to use what I got from her. It’s interesting, but I didn’t realise the amount of pressure I would feel to represent her accurately. It would have been easy, for example, to pick out all the stories from her life and travels when things went wrong and to use those to paint her as a bit of a whinger. That wouldn’t have been accurate at all but it was important to include a few of those stories to add depth to the piece. I think I kept the balance between positive and negative fairly well, but like anything it’s a skill I have to practice.
Overall, I enjoyed making the piece when I knew what I was doing with the software and I’m looking forward to working on more.
