I worked on Zeugma, the DWRL’s rhet/tech podcast, for three semesters — first, in the 2013-14 academic year, as a project group member, and then, in fall 2014, as the team leader. As part of my work on the podcast, I was involved in developing episodes from start to finish: brainstorming, conducting interviews, editing raw material and publicising the finished product.
The two episodes I’m submitting for my Audio skills badge, both embedded below, highlight the first three practices. “Riffing” was the ninth episode of Zeugma’s second season, released on April 24, 2014; it is presented here to showcase my recording and correction skills. “Riffing Redux” was the first episode of Zeguma’s third and final season, released on November 19, 2014, and was designed to showcase the previous year’s work and introduce our new team. It is presented here to showcase my arrangement and editing skills.
While completing these episodes, I helped conduct two workshops in the DWRL on audio editing and correction (2014 and 2015).
Zeugma S2E09: “Riffing”
The second season of Zeugma saw individual team members taking primary — and often sole — responsibility for single episodes. “Riffing” was my attempt to disrupt that practice, as well as the established format of the podcast: I proposed an episode following the format of one of my favourite childhood games, the sentence-at-a-time story. A single group member would compose a three-minute segment and share the final 15 seconds with the next person in line — who would in turn compose a three-minute segment riffing off that audio snippet and share their own final 15 seconds.
For my segment, which commences at 08:50 (I was provided a 30-second cue, which begins at 08:20), I conducted a series of interviews in DWRL spaces and online, and edited a solid couple of hours of footage down to just three minutes.
The major challenge here was recording and quality control, rather than — as I’d expected — selection and arrangement. One of the spaces available to me within the DWRL was quiet but echoey , another was busy at the only common time my interviewee and I had — and my third interview was conducted over Skype with my sister in Australia. After a failed attempt to use Soundflower to hijack both ends of the Skype conversation, I wound up recording directly into Audacity at my end, while she recorded into another app on hers, leaving me to later synchronise the two voices.
I edited the audio using both Audacity and Audition. I’ve found Audacity to be the easiest option for me to edit tracks for quality — removing noise is quick and easy, and I have a good understanding of the various corrections available (tutorials for which are available from the 2014 AVRG workshop). However, I prefer Audition for final arrangement — mostly because I picked up the keyboard shortcuts faster than I did with Audition.
Zeugma S3E01: “Riffing Redux”
The 2015-16 Zeugma team chose to open the season with another version of “Riffing”. We considered that this would be a good way to introduce listeners to the new team, while also allowing our team members — two of whom had zero experience working with audio — an initial bite-size project. I composed the first segment of this podcast and took responsibility for editing together everyone’s segments.
This episode showcases my audio arrangement skills better than “Riffing” 1.0. I chose to run my segment as a retrospective introduction to the season, recapping past highlights; as a result, the segment is composed of many, many tiny snippets of audio from Zeugma’s past year. As I was working with polished audio from already-released episodes, the only correction required was volume adjustment for consistency, so I composed the entire thing in Audition.