As a final assignment for Media 1 at the end of the first semester, My group, consisting of Matthew James and Qiming Zhang set out to create an Audio Essay which talked about Authenticity in Pop Music, the negative publicity that artists like Rebecca Black receive, and looking for what kind of artistic expression receives the most audience attention.

Initially we faced difficulties in how to structure the recording. Matt wanted to structure it like a kind of talk radio game show, and I wanted to structure it as practically a written essay read out loud. We came to a great middle ground which keep the audio interesting and full of captivating soundscapes and interesting formal and informal language, whilst also keeping the audio text academic and relating to a topic with references to peer reviewed journal articles. We initially started recording the first things that came to mind regarding the subject. Shortly after, we decided to gather the opinions of a local audience in the form of a vox pop, and create responses to the comments they made and the opinions they had. Looking back, I would’ve liked to have conducted a larger vox pop, so that we could’ve had a larger sample size to work with, hopefully with many people saying similar things to create a stronger argument.

We related it to what we’d learnt in class about attention as much as we could, we talked about the different forms of Hyper and Deep attention with pop music requiring hyper attention and art music requiring deep, but we didn’t want to reference it so blatantly in the final copy.

Qiming sometimes had trouble communicating his ideas to us, due to his lack of confidence with English, so we did everything we could to include him within the audio recordings, and gave him the topic of talking about the contrast between eastern and western pop music, which he delivered within the audio recording.

We communicated on a Google Docs page as well as Facebook, having every thought and idea quickly written down and suggested as an option to add to our audio essay. Often we’d each take turns creating edits of the essay, and then combining the best of both versions. Shortly after we’d created a poor quality draft, we gathered feedback from the media professional who came to see the class workshop. Her name was Catherine, and she instructed that we should redo the recording to make our arguments key ideas more precise, and  play on the interesting group dynamic. Matt wanted to keep the feel of a casual talk show, and so Catherine suggested we record some of our audio from within a car while driving, to add a more casual connotation and more interesting soundscape. We inserted this idea into the recording implying we were freely talking on our way to and from the vox pop.

We ended up with many recordings, many of them often not including very academic material, and had to be left out. The end product was a result of sifting through many recordings, and picking the best parts from each.

Some of the things I found difficult were.

• Editing the recordings to have the same background noise, eg white noise and indicators of the car
• Keeping track of the huge number of recordings that were made
• Keeping up with the edits that were constantly changing throughout the group.

With the audio essay now completed, I’m happy with how it turned out. Personally, I would’ve preferred it if we had used more scripted material, to keep the audio more compact and precise, but I can appreciate the casual delivery, as it makes the audience more calm and interested. I can safely say that I could apply the experience to future projects, and create a more solid and well planned out audio documentary in the future.