Audio 1 Part 1: Instructions

The Audio 1 assignment has two parts:

  1. Unedited interview file
  2. Edited MP3 file (you can hear an example of an EDITED file)

Follow these instructions for conducting and recording the interview for Part 1 of this assignment:

Recorder set-up

  1. Follow all instructions from Module 2: "Getting to Know Your Audio Recorder" to set up your recorder correctly.
  2. If you have the Zoom H2, record this file in WAV format.
  3. For cheaper recorders, use the highest quality settings. The WMA or MP3 format is okay for you.

Choose a person

For this assignment ONLY -- in the entire course -- you should interview someone you know. (For all other assignments, you must interview strangers.) The reason why this assignment is different is that your interview subject should be willing to do you a favor and allow you to interview him or her multiple times so that you can fulfill the requirements.

  1. You must interview the person face to face.
  2. You must use your audio recorder as shown in the Module 2 video "Audio Interviews."
  3. The topic of the interview must be a trip or travel experience that the interview subject had in the past. No other topic is acceptable for this assignment. The travel can be a study abroad, a week at summer camp several years ago, a weekend in New York, etc., etc.
  4. If your interview subject has no interesting travel experience to talk about, then choose someone else.

Learning how long is long enough

The length of the interview is part of your grade. If your interview is too long or too short, it will be hard for you to edit it for Part 2. If you practice, you will be able to tell when about 5 minutes have passed. This is a skill that you are expected to develop in the process of completing this assignment.

Do not use any artificial means to cut off the interview. Once a student set an alarm clock. It rang at the end of 5 minutes, and she just stopped there. Are you going to use an alarm clock in professional life? How stupid. Do not use any alarms.

You are interviewing someone you know. Ask him or her to help you by being patient. You might need to do the interview three or four times before you get it right. So what? That would not take more than about half an hour.

Spend the time now to get it right, and it will help you all semester long.

Technical requirements

  1. You must wear headphones (or earbuds) while you conduct the interview. Reason: This is the only way to be sure the sound quality is good, there are no weird heating or air conditioning noises, buzzing from fluorescent lights, etc. The headphones hear what the microphone hears.
  2. Start recording just before you begin asking real interview questions. Do not include the chatting before the interview.
  3. Do not pause or stop the recording once the interview begins.
  4. Get the person's ID at the end. How to do it correctly is shown in the Module 2 video "Audio Interviews."
  5. After the ID, record about 10 seconds of "room tone." You do not need more than about 10 seconds.
  6. Do not edit or trim or alter the audio file in any way. The file you submit for a grade must come straight from your recorder.
  7. Check the length of the audio file. If it is too short or too long, do it over. (See the section above for why this is an important part of this assignment.)
  8. Listen to the file AFTER you copy it to your computer. Use headphones to do so. Sound quality is part of your grade. If it sounds bad, then do it over.

Content requirements

  1. The content of the interview must be interesting to a general audience of college students.
  2. The topic is specified above, under "Choose a person."
  3. When you edit this for Part 2, you will cut out all of your own voice. Only your interview subject's voice will be heard. The edited version (Part 2) will sound like someone telling about his/her experience. It will not sound like an interview.
  4. However, THIS PART (Part 1) must be a proper interview. You are the reporter. You need to ask good questions and control the interview.
  5. Focus your questions on the travel experience -- the best, the worst, the most memorable, something that was scary, something unexpected, etc. NOT FACTS. Text is good for relating facts; audio is best suited for emotion.
  6. Content is part of your grade. The content must be interesting. The interview must be a proper journalistic interview, not a casual chat.

Naming your file

The filename for this assignment must match this style:

Your last name, your first initial, an underscore, and audio1p1

For example, if your name is Maria Jones, and your file happens to be in WAV format, then its name would be:

jonesm_audio1p1.wav

If your file has a different audio file format, then the file extension will be different. For example:

jonesm_audio1p1.wma

PLEASE NOTE that it is VERY IMPORTANT in this course that you name files EXACTLY as instructed for every assignment. Failure to do so will result in zero points for assignments, because a misnamed file is a file that will be LOST.

Questions?

If you have questions about any part of this assignment, post them in the Course Questions discussion in Sakai.