This week was definitely a lot more work than last week when it came to setting things up, creating the blog posts, and finishing up the assignments that were required of us. As usual, I started off the week by creating my first daily create of the week (we were required to do 3), and so the first one was to create a new word that represents a dreamy and disorienting time. I decided to come up with the word “dreamfuzzle,” and you can find the whole post with an explanation and picture at this link. My second daily create of the week was to write a poem about lemons but not using any of the words that they said in the prompt. You can find that post here. My final daily create was to create an image of something one-handed, half-minded, and miniature version of something you do. I decided to create a mini tennis player since that is something I can do one-handed, with half my mind, and have it be a daily practice. You can find that link here. After doing my daily creates, I decided to get cracking on some of the assignments that we needed to do this week. As a result, I went and downloaded and experimented a little bit with Audacity. I have used Audacity before but only at its simplest uses and so I took some times to try and figure out where all the important functions are located and what the user experience was like working within the application. The next step was to create a free SoundCloud account, in which case, I already had one and so this step was relatively easy, I just made sure I had access to said account and then moved on. Next we were tasked with watching two videos from RadioLab and listening to a audio clip on SoundCloud and giving our thoughts on audio storytelling and the connections and meanings that may be present within the sounds of a final audio clip. I wrote out my thoughts in a blog post that explains my thought process on the youtube videos as well as the audio clip, and you can read all about those thoughts there. My next task for the week was to create a radio bumper for the DS106 Radio Station. For this assignment, I created a radio station bumper for the 106.1 radio station because the “106” from DS106 matches with the radio station frequency that I did. I just created a bumper for the radio station with the top hits, pop, rap, etc. This was fun to do because I always heard these bumpers growing up but never really took any interest in them until now. Either way, you can find, read, and listen to my radio bumper at this link. The next step to completing this weeks assignments was to listen to the DS106 Radio Station to gain insight into various audio productions and we were tasked with creating a blog post about it that discusses our thoughts. You can find that post here. Moving on, the next assignment we had the chance to complete was a sound effect story, which means that we had to tell a story with just the sound clips that we could find on freesound.org. This was an interesting assignment because it was cool to see what sounds could come together to create a final story that actually had a meaning. The next assignment we were tasked with was to create a brainstorm blog post that talked about various ideas that we came up with for a short radio show group project that we will be doing in the future. I decided that since Julius Lawrence, another course character, was interested in investing, maybe him and Xander could work together on a new project.

Now that the required assignments for the week are done, I moved into the three other audio assignments we were tasked with completing. The first assignment that I chose to do was to create a breaking new story. I chose to complete this assignment in regards to my course character, Xander Neoteric. I used a third party website that was listed in the assignment description to complete this assignment and you can find that post here. For this assignment, I used a AI chatbot to generate a background image of a news set and one of the avatars the third-party website had and allowed it to speak the words that I typed out using their built-in text-to-speech software. My next assignment was to create a relaxing sound using the sounds available on freesound.org. That post is linked here. I tried to use sounds that I already knew were relaxing and put them into audacity and fiddled with the timing and length of each sound clip to make one final, relaxing sound. I enjoyed this process as it allowed me to mess around with various sounds and figure out which combination created the most relaxing sounds. Finally, my third assignment was similar to the second in that I had to create a spooky sound with at least 4 different sounds from freesound.org. My spooky sound assignment turned out really good and I was able to conjure up a final product that when listened to, really evoked a sense of fear and created a spooky atmosphere. Finally, I finished off my week with some commenting and made sure to try and look through a variety of posts and comment on a few as the week went on.

I did not encounter too many issues this week when completing my assignments. I thought things went pretty smoothly this week and I enjoyed doing all of the assignments. However, the only issues that I can think of for this week was the fact that when I first downloaded and starting using Audacity, it took me a while to gain the proper knowledge on how to use the application and entailed a lot of googling to try and figure out where certain settings and functions were located. But after figuring that out, I was able to continue smoothly with the rest of the assignments for the week and really only hindered me on the first assignment using the application which was the radio bumper. From this week, I would say that creating either the relaxing sound or the spooky sound was my favorite assignment. This is because I found it very interesting how the various sounds could come together to create a final product that was better than all of the individual sounds. It took some trial and error, however, that was enjoyable because I got to see a bunch of the possible combinations I could create with the various sounds and how they worked together to produce differing results.

I definitely think that I accomplished all of the requirements for the assignments for this week and I think I did them to the best of my ability. Like stated before, I enjoyed most of the assignments for this week and really allowed me to be creative with the sounds that I was using and the final products I was coming away with. Again, I really enjoyed the creation of the spooky and relaxing sounds, however, I enjoyed all of the assignments from this week. I would not do anything differently for the work that I did this week as it was completed with effort, time, and creativeness. I believe that there are no larger issues at hand with my work. I think that the assignments were done properly and with effort. I do not have any further questions at this time for the class. One thing I will focus on in the future, it just to get better at working with and understanding audacity and the various functions that the application has to offer.