Peep the artwork! (Featuring the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant)

After those recordings, this was how the project first looked inside Audacity. I tried to search up ambient beds like room tone, white noise, and a long wind effect. My idea was to create a sound bed so the narration didn’t feel empty.

At this point, I was still just testing out what the project could sound like -- with very rough and messy placement of narration, foley, and background. The foley sound recorded are only the pen sribbles.

This draft was important because it let me see how long my excerpt would run. It also helped me plan where to insert sound effects. It reminded me that narration alone can feel too bare. And lastly, it helped calm down my anxiety telling me that I was going to fail this class because I had decided to change Project Plans.

Perhaps the best way to describe this stage is: sketching before painting.

The next thing to do after realizing I did want music for my audiobook, was search for the pieces. I've asked some classical music enthusiast friends for some recommendations, and most said something from Saint-Saëns and Debussy. Originally, I thought of doing “cartoon-like” music, but after hours of searching and listening, I went with:

• Gabriel Fauré – Pavane, Op. 50 for the first half and,

• Claude Debussy – Golliwogg’s Cakewalk for the second half which had a more "mischievous" feel to it.

There are also sound effects that I can't record myself which are the jungle sounds and airplane sound effect.

 Mixing was the part where things finally got a little manageable -- for the most part. My project was still fairly simple compared to a full production, but it had narration, foley, music, and ambient layers all competing for space. The first thing I focused on was making my voice clean and clear. 

Once the everything was laid out, I worked on how the other elements sat around the vocal. I used EQ to carve space so narration always stayed on top, then added fades so sound effects didn’t just cut in abruptly. Auto-ducking the music helped push it down whenever I was speaking, though sometimes I still had to adjust levels manually. At this stage, I learned that mixing isn’t about making everything equally loud, but deciding what should be foreground (narration) and what should be background (music, foley, ambience). Every adjustment was about guiding the listener’s focus without sacrificing vocal tone.

At first, I thought I could just lower the music volume to make my voice stand out. But when I played the mix on speakers, the background almost vanished and it sounded flat. We don't want that. What worked better was balancing with both volume automation and EQ: the music kept its body, but I scooped out a bit of the midrange so it didn’t clash with my vocal. 

I sent a rough version to a couple of friends for feedback. They liked the pacing and didn’t want me to mess with the tempo too much (said it didn't sound like me), but almost everyone said the same thing: the “s” sounds were painful. That’s when I went down the rabbit hole of de-essing. Audacity didn’t really give me the control I needed, so I had to export my vocal track as WAV and move to Waveform (Tracktion).