The strongest difficulty of composing this piece for the ear was the method of recording. Audio profiles are set to a high recording standard due to the commonality of professional podcasts and radio shows. The interviews on channels such as NPR have clear spoken audio over fitting background sound, but using an iPhone to record made the former of these two components very difficult to obtain. That being said, using audio editing tools aided very much in compressing the levels of the vocals, and removing low background noise.
What also helped create a professional soundscape was the addition of chosen background noises. Adding this backing track was a hard choice to make, because the topic of this piece is so serious, it sometimes didn’t feel right to include accompanying noise. To counteract this, I left some pieces of spoken word unaccompanied. Fading out construction noises and background music was an easy way to highlight certain sentences. Also, choosing matching music and background noise was quite simple, as I attempted to include visual language in my monologue that could be matched with sound, such as a bustling construction site, or a city-street setting. It did not seem necessary to have an extensive amount of musical variation, as most of the piece was made up of the interview. These were the sonic rhetorical choices that I had to make, and I chose to go with more cliché descriptive background noise and somber bluesy/jazzy music so as not to distract from the human rights issues that were being discussed for most of the piece.
The biggest issue that I pondered when attempting to create an informative piece was the actual content. At first, I was going to create a fictional worker that would inform us of the working conditions, but I decided that was too off-base. After interviewing Dr. Coles, I was driven to interview an actual resident, as I wanted to present a more informed perspective. This proved to be impossible due to time restraints. If I were to redo this piece, I would interview a current resident.
Notes:
“Demolition 2” by David Schaffer, Free Sound Archive
Interview with Nicholas Coles, Friday March 17th, 2017.
Povo Que Caís Descalço by Dead Combo, Free Music Archive