Audio Story
I wanted to tell the story of an astronaut’s experience in space.
I attended a conference with the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and had the opportunity to hear Mike Massimino, an astronaut, recount his experience of seeing the Earth from his spacewalk. He used this incredible language of not being able to look at the Earth because it was “so beautiful, [he] had to look away, it was like [he] was looking at a secret and that humans weren’t allowed to look.” I had already known about the overview effect on astronauts, but hearing it from Mike made the experience feel just a little bit closer to the experience.
I knew I wanted to somehow use this language to convey a feeling or a hearing of a memory, and I knew I didn’t want to use my own voice, or just have someone telling a story. I definitely wanted to try for some ambience and soundscapes.
I started out by looking for audio of Mike where he used similar language to answer questions during interviews or in video clips or documentaries about astronauts in space. I started listening to them and noting down the moments or phrases that I wanted to use. There was one moment where a child asks him about his favorite memory of space and I noted that as a possible way to introduce this “retelling” of emotion.
I downloaded all the video clips that felt relevant to me, and starting editing together phrases within interviews and deleting some of the more anecdotal, repetitive moments, or jokes, questions from the interviewers, etc. until I had three interviews (there is no interview cross-pollination). I then started playing around in Audacity with distorting the shortest and least emotional interview as a test.
I knew I wanted both soundscape and Mike’s words to still come through, so I started thinking a bit more conceptually about what I wanted to convey. I thought about how hearing his words made me almost feel like I had experienced the same feeling, and describing that feeling though, for me, felt more like longing or frustration because I am hearing a recounting of a memory of a feeling of someone else, and those layers of separation between Mike’s feeling and my experiencing as a listener, was what I wanted to convey.
I wanted to weave in and out of feeling, memory, and account, so I layered my three interviews and and made the bottom interview the most subtle and the most distorted to stand for the feeling and the top interview I preserved the words to stand for the recounting. I only played with the volume levels a bit to highlight important moments, and de-emphasize more anecdotal moments. The middle interview, which stood for the memory, got the most “treatment” in that I wanted to distort it enough that it was very difficult for the listener to comprehend, but still preserve some key words. I used volume, distortion, echo, reverb, pitch and tempo to pull and stretch the audio so that it “moves” back and forth between discern-able and not.
If I could do this project again, I would play with the timing of the layering more, perhaps bringing in the layers one by one instead of all at once, and paying more attention to the overall listening experience, rather than the three separately. This was my first time using Audacity and I did not enjoy it. I might try a different program if I revisit this assignment.
Audio Credit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AipdIH5TzH8&list=PPSV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccvunAdkdy0&list=PPSV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZMsu9TFhjY&list=PPSV