February 24, 2010 Soundscape Assignment This assignment requires students to closely read a text and add the appropriate sound effects and background music,using Creative Commons sites. Illuminating a text with sound is a fun way to get students to incorporate twenty first century technological skills with a traditional close read of a text. The students will have the opportunity to take ownership of their work by bringing their personality into their own recording of the text, and then by applying background effects and music of their choice. This assignment allows the students to bring the text to life.  While somewhat difficult at first, the Soundscape assignment was fun and exciting to complete. Adding inflection and intonation to a chosen text, and then using adding sound effects and a music track as background is somewhat of a tedious process, but enjoyable nonetheless. The music, narration and, sound effects are overlayed and edited through Audacity, a free online audio editing program that can be found and downloaded at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/. It is quite time consuming and challenging to get your "performance" of the text and the added effects just right, but the finished product is worth the effort.
Attached below is my reading of the closing paragraph to James Joyce's short story, "The Dead." This scene portrays Gabriel's self contemplation as he has recently returned for a holiday, to his family's home in Ireland. Gabriel discovers that his wife has amorous memories of her past love, Michael Furrey, and that his family sees him as an outsider. What Gabriel has become, as a journalist who works in England, represents the death of Irish tradition. The snow falls.
The sound effects and background track were uploaded to Audacity through www.freesound.org, a site licensed under Creative Commons. |