For your second project, we’re asking you to work in pairs (with one group of three*) to develop, produce, and post a short audio podcast that provides some critical discussion of digital audio. You should thus think about how you can use the audio form itself as a means of thinking about web-based audio; what can you convey with audio that you couldn’t convey in writing, for instance, or in images? The length of your podcast is flexible, but you should keep 5 minutes in mind as an upper limit; the point is to produce something polished that conveys significant ideas, rather than to produce your masterwork.
You are free to record audio wherever you like; microphones and portable recorders are available for checkout from the IMS Production Center, in the basement of Scott Hall. You are also welcome to use found audio clips — even copyrighted clips — but be sure to credit the sources of the material you use, either within the audio or in the accompanying blog entry.
We’ll demonstrate Audacity for you this week, a free program that allows easy editing and encoding of audio, although you are welcome to use other audio programs that you might know. Your podcast should be encoded in MP3 format and placed in your “MyWebs” folder in your userspace. You should then include a link to the audio in a post to the class blog that uses the category “podcast.” We can then all subscribe to the RSS feed for that category in an audio aggregator like iTunes to gather the files. You are also encouraged to provide commentary on the process in the blog post, and to comment on one another’s entries.
Your podcast and accompanying blog post will be due at the start of lab on Friday, March 6.
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*The group of three should plan on producing either 50% more material, or 50% better material, since you’ve got 50% more labor.