Reflection part 1

For the assignment 4 “Sounds of 2020”, our group’s topic is Hope, this is a broad topic which confused me at first, there’s a lot of thing we want to be changed or want to achieve in this year. Mention to 2020, this is an unusual year, I have gone through a lot of hardships like most people. In order to avoid the outbreak in Australia, I just come back to China two weeks ago, although, I have already back to China successfully, I lost “something” in there, which made me despair for a while. Christine says achieving one’s “vocal authority” in a podcast means finding one’s individual authenticity(Mottram, 2017). Instead of make a summary of the whole year, I would like to talk about the specific experience happened on myself, which made me felt deeper and have more desire to talk about.

The “thing” that I left in Australia is my cat, the one has been with me for nearly three years. For me he is no longer a pet, but a closest friend also a family. At first, I planned to take him back to China with me, but the flights which accepted pets were cancelled because of the epidemic, so I have to look for some other ways.

In the process of finding a way for him to returning home, I encountered many setbacks, so I divided my story into four parts with different date and talk about what I have gone through during this time. I think this is a good way for the listeners to catch up with the story, also let them better integrate. In the break point of those time, I used the sound of calendar to make the transaction clearly. Music can make our stories more attractive and immersive, listeners are used to listening to the music to promote the stories(May, 2016). In my episode, I didn’t use a background music to run through the entire audio, I try to make the story ups and downs. I added some music which strong emotion to the part where my mood changed significantly, when I talked about I saw the hope to bring my cat back, the music will be happy and chill, but when I mentioned some cruel reality that made me unable to bring him back, the music is stressful. There is a news report in my audio which happened on a beach, I also added the sounds of ocean wave in there. The sound effects make the story real and vivid, it can attract the listeners’ attention. At the end of my story I narrated how does my cat important to me, and illustrate my wish to reunite with him, I added the sounds of cat meow in that part, which makes the audio warmer and lifelike, it also gives me and the audience a hope, in such a roughest time, life still gives us a lot of good moments, and we should always keep expecting in everyday life.

I was quite enjoy making this podcast, for me, this is not only a mission I need to complete, during the process of doing these, I recalled a lot of good memories that I experienced with my cat.  The content and style of podcast are private in nature, but when the public media discussing the emergence of the podcast as a new medium, they identify it as a converged medium of audio, bringing the active intentions of podcasters and hosts into the public domain(Llinares, Fox, Berry, 2018). While I’m sharing all the difficulties that I have encountered, I wish I can bring some help to those people who have the same worries as me. When I finish recording this audio, I lost my anxiety and full of expectations about reunite with him.

Reference

May M, 2016, ‘Score! Best practices for using music in audio storytelling’, <https://training.npr.org/2016/07/05/score-best-practices-for-using-music-in-audio-storytelling/ >viewed on 19 oct 2020.

Mottram C, 2017, ‘Finding a pitch that resonates: an examination of gender and vocal authority in podcasting’, viewed 19 oct 2020

Llinares, D., Fox, N., & Berry, R. (Eds.), 2018, ‘Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media’ viewed on 19 October 2020.