Author Archives: Rylie’s Riveting Region

Getting Our Show Off the Ground!

I’m looking forward to next week and really getting in to writing, performing, and editing the radio show! This week was sort of odd, as I felt like I should have done more to work done on the final product. However, I think using the audio assignments to make small progress will ultimately be helpful. I’m really excited about the idea that we have for our show, adn just want to work on that! I guess I really don’t know what to write about here!

I talked through a lot of ideas and things with Rebecca, but Ethan really only connected with the rest of the group on Discord towards the end of the week. But now that we’re all on the same page, it should all be good!

Turns Out, Listening to Podcasts Doesn’t Mean Making Cover Art Will Be Easy

For my little bit of design work this week, I created a logo/cover art for our radio show, Days of Crime and Roses. I used Adobe Illustrator for this, and sourced my font off of 1001 Fonts, which isn’t a font site that I’ve used before but I liked the variety! Once I found one that I liked, I ported it in to Illustrator and began working. My base was a paper texture that I duplicated and changed the blending mode on. After that, I continued adding both tech elements like the glitch effect and pixels as well as physical elements like the newspapers and coffee stains. I think this design would work well as a cover image or social media icon, and I think the font is strong enough to act as a general logo! I didn’t want to go for anything too literal, which did make getting started a bit difficult.

Welcome, DOCAR!

I decided to modify the “Good Morning Message” assignment in order to make an intro for our radio show, Days of Crime and Roses (aka DOCAR).

I used Audacity to cut together Frank Sinatra’s Days of Wine and Roses in order to make it a little more tech noir. I used a video of a women demonstrating how to pronounce the word “crime” in order to get a human audio of the word, and then copied the audio and distorted it in several different ways. I used my favorite YouTube to mp3 converter to turn these into editable files. I also grabbed a static effect from FreeSounds just to make everything extra disorienting. My favorite part of all of this was finding the perfect piece of instrumental to go under the word “crime” to make it fit within the rest of the song.

Podcast Ads of the Past

For this assignment, I completed the “MailChimp Message,” but instead with a more modern podcast sponsor. I listen to a lot of podcasts and have heard Quince advertised on almost every single one, so I opted to do that. Our radio show, Days of Crime and Roses, is now oficially sponsored by Quince! Hearing the MailChimp ad was so nostalgic, as I remember listening to it on Serial all those years ago!

To complete this, I used text-to-speech generators of several different voices. I ported everything into Audacity and spliced it all up. After that, I used Aiva to create the perfect backing audio for my ad and may propose using the same audio (or something similar) for our radio show!

Getting Back in to ds106!

Following Spring Break, I’m thankful that this week was so light. I’m in a radio show group with Rebecca and Ethan, and we’re going to get started working soon! It’s going to be true crime, but all of the crimes were commited by our course characters. Writing the script for this will be interesting, for sure! The Daily Creates this week were interesting, and I enjoyed reading the color names list.

Warning: Tech Noir!

I spent my time this week really engaging with the themes of tech noir, as I analyzed the scenes from The Terminator. I decided to create a newspaper, which I made via Canva. I included both events, even though I had more to write about in regards to the shootout scene.

Following that, I decided to keep with the idea of tech taking over/the AI revolution when I approached the PSA assignment. I contined to experiment with Audacity and made an emergency radio announcement. I had a ton of fun with the audio assignments a couple weeks ago, and found myself wanting to work on stuff like that again!

And as always, Daily Creates! Not much to say about these this week.

Coming back to my goals, I took what I wrote last week to heart and got my work done early! I was quite proud of myself, and I’m glad I was able to actually implement my changes.

TDC 2/25 – 2/28

February 25, 2025 – Opposite POV

February 26, 2025 – A Story

There once was a frog, who lived at a pond. He was picked up one sunny day by a young lady in a beautiful outfit. The frog could not believe his eyes! The girl kissed the frog gently on the lips, looked at him sadly, and put him back down. The frog went back to his life at the pond, now knowing what love could feel like.

February 28, 2025 – Clouds

Wouldn’t Want to Hear This on the Radio!

For the PSA assignment, I decided to create an audio PSA in the style of the United States’ emergency broadcasts. I found an audio of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) that I liked on YouTube, and used a YouTube-to-mp3 tool to convert it into something I could manipulate. I had some difficulty at first finding a voice-to-text tool that I thought sounded human enough but also mechanical enough to mimic the actual EAS voice, but I settled on a site that uses Microsoft’s talk-to-text tools and allows you to download them from there. I used the “Tony” voice at 1 speed and -15 pitch. My script used similar language to an EAS broadcast, but I discussed an AI takeover rather than a weather event. I then found some soft radio hum on FreeSound, similar to what can be heard in the background of the EAS audio. I compiled everything in Audacity, and included some bumps in the radio hum audio to add to the eerie, unsafe feeling that I wanted this PSA to envoke.