PB2 has been a daunting experience for me. It helps that during the week I was forced to delve into some of the listenings and themes further as it was my turn for the weekly update. This helped me hone in on something I found interesting and gave me something to explore for the essay.

In reflection I feel as though my technical incompetencies and inexperience in the audio field can definitely be heard and seen in the workings of the piece. I was actually quite proud of the voice recording that I captured and felt it was the cleanest I had ever been able to gather, which was encouraging. However in the end I felt like the piece was a little too straight forward and conventional. My inability to perform complex tasks in Audition as well as having not listened to many unconventional or creative audio pieces held me back considerably.

I think my essay was also kind of weak and I struggled to hit the hammer on the head with succinct lines and arguments. One of my downfalls in essay writing is being a little too long winded at times and having to trim it down for a short audio piece was even harder.

Overall while I think I did what I actually did at a competent level, I’d like to push myself creatively further next time. Hopefully over the coming weeks I can practice some skills and really learn some new techniques during the next Project Brief, which promises to force the creative hand and enter some new experimental territory.

Listening to Denton’s Better off Dead was great. I’m hoping this helps me identify some further listening as I thought this was a good quality piece and although rather traditional in its format it was a fresh topic and one that hasn’t been covered much. Picking apart the ethics and moral decisions of producers of these types of stories has been intriguing and a very philosophical debate. There are lots of angles to consider and each person has a different moral compass of course. The real ethical boundaries are quite grey in regards to these transgression pieces and are quite circumstantial.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the Radio Diary format of Thembi’s AIDS Diary and consequently Emily and I have pursued it for out weekly update in week 4. It’s a perfect context for discussing ethics and provides some interesting discussion – or at least hopefully will – when we lead the class next week. Having been pulled by the human interest and candidness of the Radio Diary I began to explore some of Joe Richman’s other work with Radio Diaries, etc, and have been enjoying his work.This would be an area that I would like to dabble in perhaps later down the track.

Rebecca’s guest lecture was interesting. It was refreshing to hear some of these sorts of topics brought up again after having two years away from Rebecca’s Communication Histories and Technologies class. Rebecca’s discussion about transgression and mutual exclusion resonated with me – mostly in regards to her views that transgressions such as racism, sexism, etc can’t be fixed by turning around the A/Not A relationship and that to truly fix an inequality A and Not A must be able to merge and become a group of A,B,C, etc. That was a rather simplified explanation, but the point stands. That’s the sort of gear that I work on internally and how I approach life.

It was great to get our first in class assignment out in the open and receive feedback as well as listen to the works of others. It’s been a helpful process for learning about audio as a medium. As I’m not particularly confident in the audio field I am very critical of the work that I’ve done and generally judge it harshly – however the feedback is promising and provides a more positive light on things.

I think improving my skills can only improve with more practice each week, listening to podcasts as much and as often as I can and also pushing myself to do things outside my comfort zones.. Such as recording my own voice!

Brian’s guest lecture was interesting and produced some intriguing discussion around the discourse of Transgression and relating it back to the medieval carnival. The idea of transgression and transgressing becomes more apparent with each week and this gives me confidence in pursuing the ideas for my main project.

Thinking about the final assignment this early on has given me a bit of inspiration and helped guide me in the right direction. Now that I have a better understanding of audio and transgression I feel a lot more confident and feel like my idea is going to be a real possibility. I’d like to use my Grandfather as a subject and talk about the idea of people movements and displacements during or following conflicts, and the prejudices that might be placed on them by society. The way that society transgresses against these kinds of people. His story is an interesting one, being a product of WWII era Germany. As it is something that interests me it helps to motivate my work towards achieving this outcome!

My goal is to find some great audio works to inspire me and provide some ideas – alas due to my inexperience in the field I have had somewhat of a troublesome time finding anything that is remotely interesting to listen to in the history field regarding podcasts and radio documentaries. They all seem to be general history book style informative pieces!

Although perhaps when I selected this class I only had a vague understanding of what a “transgression story” was, I began to develop a bit of an understanding after the first week of classes. I’m still getting around the idea of what a transgression story is and what sort of styles can apply to it.

I have an interest in sound and story telling however and I think this will be a class that can help to develop my audio skills which are rudimentary as well as hone my story telling skills. I’m also guessing it might push me out of my comfort zone a little as chances are I will end up having to use my own voice for recording at one point or another, something I’m not accustomed too or that comfortable with.

So far I have enjoyed listening to the radio narratives and documentary for the class listenings/readings and have found it a very useful way to fast track my understanding of the whole idea of sound as a medium. It’s not something that I’ve done a lot of before so I’ve got some catching up to do in comparison to a lot of my class mates who all seem to have a broad understanding of podcasting and radio narrative/documentary and already have listened to a comprehensive back catalogue of such material.