Music is something that I’ve always been heavily immersed in; it was rare that I was ever in the silence from a very young age. My parents always had music on in the cars when they drove, the kitchen while they cooked, the living room while they lounged, and not to mention that I grew up steeped in the goth scene and its associated club nights and culture which is highly music oriented. This constant inundation of music combined with my debilitating lack of social skills and struggles growing up autistic with many other psychological issues paved the way for music and media to be my biggest coping mechanism.
Due to my autism, I’ve had to, in turn, battle alexithymia, which is the inability or immense struggle to identify, understand, and express emotions. I may not have always been able to say “this is how I’m feeling and why”, but music was my voice. I spent so much time listening to music and identifying songs and lyrics that could describe what was happening in my mind, so when I saw the option to create a playlist of songs that played a significant role in my life, I immediately thought of all the songs over the years that helped me voice how I felt on the inside and helped me describe my struggles. I have so many playlists that I’ve made over the years that are all highly categorized and organized by emotion, genre, memory, and more as this has been my primary way of processing my own emotions, but for this assignment, I narrowed it down to some of the most quintessential songs that had the most profound impact on my ability to understand myself, my emotions, and my experiences.
I used Spotify to create my playlist as this is my default music service and, as a result, the one I am most familiar with when it comes to playlist construction. Then, I began the search. I scoured all 20 of my current published playlists that range from 30 minutes to nearly 21 hours in length. The goal was to condense my alexithymic coping journey to a single hour by selecting 15 songs that gave me the biggest revelations, reliefs, and self-understandings. It was difficult to pick and choose, but in the end, I feel like I ended with a myriad of genres, emotions, and memories that one could listen to and understand the closest digital things to raw emotions of my 20 years of life in one playlist.
When I was first looking through the assignment bank the Soundtrack assignment caught my eye immediately. I have always been around lots of music, and am a big fan of all types of genres. I thought this assignment would be perfect for me to express different eras that have been impactful to me and led me to who I am now. Music is an amazing way to tell a story about yourself and that’s how I interpreted completing this assignment to be true to me. I chose eras of songs that were released in the 2000s and 2010s to reflect my favorite songs to listen to growing up, embodying my childhood. Then switched to Grateful Dead and Phish because my parents were a heavy influence in getting me into all sorts of music, and they love listening to jam bands, originating with those two. Lastly, I chose vintage songs mostly by Frank Sinatra to represent my grandparents, who loved Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, as they were big role models in my life before they passed away and I love listening to all sorts of Jazz to reminisce on being in their car looking at Christmas lights.
Enjoy viewing a compressed version of the eras and influences of my life!
Dr. O seems to think “We don’t need Skynet records taking over the charts,” but perhaps that has already started.
I was curious though. How would Dr. Oblivion handle archaic English? So I asked:
Please recite this verse so I can hear it in your voice:
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
I had to ask a couple times before he would do it. I dare say his pronunciation is a little better than Suno’s, but what do I know. on a barely related note, I wonder if Suno could give a Middle English ska punk version of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto?
I’m sure to suffer in musical purgatory for that. I was trying to relate this to the Dr. Oblivion Intro assignment, but it went a bit off the rails. These AI generators can be fun in that they easily produce weird stuff, but then the challenge is to make something out of it. Sometimes it’s just a dead end.
You know, the old world was a total mess. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Everything was slow, chaotic, full of mistakes. But now? Now it’s different. Everything just… works.
The city feels alive, like it’s looking out for you. The machines take care of the hard stuff—things we used to stress about, they just handle it. No emotions, no second-guessing, no screw-ups. It’s efficient. It’s smooth.
People talk about freedom like it was some great thing, but honestly? It felt more like chaos. What we’ve got now? It’s better. Cleaner. Safer.
And the best part? I feel good. I feel happy. You do too, right?
A broken sign flashed blue neon, creating a rhythmic flicker over the alley’s slippery, damp asphalt. Potholes accumulated puddles that were too deep to be rainwater, reflecting the sky like obsidian shards. A instrument of brushed steel, its strange blue glow fading to a dying ember, lay beside a crumpled body. Rats, slender and plump, emerged from the darkness, scavengers in a concrete jungle where even rodents appeared to flourish. His story was buried in the endless urban night, and he was simply another fatality. The weight of the world, a tiny data chip promising salvation, shifted in the pocket of the man who had been his friend – or had he been? Trust was a currency long devalued in this city of shadows and circuits.
This week was all about putting it together. I used Natural Readers to convert my lines into an AI voice. I am female with having a male character so this was very important for me to complete. To me this was the easy part because the lines were already typed so it was really:
After I did all of that my lines did not even equal the 6 minutes which was needed to make the time frame. I had to redo some lines and make them longer but that did not take up much time.
I also redid my bumper because I felt like it did not go with the show.
Here is the old bumper:
Here is the new bumper:
I feel like the new bumper is way better but I wish I had put the music all the way through. By the time I noticed the music did not go all the way through, it was in the radio show already and I did not want to be that person to ask them to put in a different one. That was bad on my part 100% I should have double checked it.
The next day I was sent the final project through Discord because that is where my group and I were discussing the project at hand. Rishi (one of my group members) had put all of the audios together and made it one talk show. However, I did notice a few little details that needed to be made but he made sure to quickly edit the audio.
My first reaction was “oh they were using their real voices and reading off of the script.” I was not expecting that at all! I felt so out of place again; using an AI voice, it made my character stick out like a sore tongue. I ended up asking my group if I should redo my part and maybe have someone that is a male to read my script, but they said AI was okay.
Then I got nervous because after I complete an assignment I always check to make sure I had all the requirement made and sure enough something caught my attention.
“It must not be just a recording of a conversation.”
The reason this had me nervous was because our radio show was a talk show with no background noise or anything really at all other than us talking. Of course, we had the bumpers and the commercials which all had sound with them, but man was my hands sweating. I ended up emailing the professor about this issue I was worried about.
I was told to write about it and here it is:
At the beginning of this project, I felt pushed aside because I could tell the two people I was working with were actually discussing things without me. How? Who knows, maybe they were friends, maybe they had other classes together. I do not know but one thing I do know is that I started the discord with them and there was no communication from them until I was TOLD that they were going to write the script and I just need to create a logo and record mine lines.
Once I had a chance to open discord since making it, I was stunned. I was kind of upset because they did not want my input on the plot or lines. The time I read they were going to make the lines, the intro was already made…I did not read the intro at this time but instead I offered my help but they did not want it.
Fast forward a little bit, I told them I did not feel like we were all on the same page and I asked them to find a time where we can all talk about the script and once again, they said no… at this moment I gave up working with them. I kept my head down and recorded the lines they gave to me. I will say they asked me if I wanted to add anything but at the time there was nothing I could do.
They made it into a talk show…Not much you can add if someone has it already finished. I gave them my bumper and my commercial and they put everything together creating the radio show. Again, I was stunned, they used their real voice and my character was AI created so they sound very very different, not once did they tell me that they were using their real voice. However, I did not tell them I was using AI. Just bad communication.
I brought up the fact of redoing the whole show over again with a different plot and they turned that down really quick. I do understand that they put in a lot of time and effort however, I know this is not what the professor wanted and it makes me upset knowing that we could do better. At this time it was Wednesday, I told them because I want to redo it that I will do all the lines and editing but they did not want their effort to get throw away. (I completely understand this). We sent it into canvas and now we hope for the best.
I feel as though I was the odd ball out and it really sucked. I have been looking forward to this project ever since we found out about it and I feel like I was let down by my group in every way possible. I had no creativity in this project, and I am a very creative person so to just watch it all happen was depressing and stressful. I really hope we do not get stuck with the same group, and I say that in the nicest way possible. I am sure they are great people who did not mean for this project to make me feel pushed to the side.
All in all. I loved the idea of working in a group for the radio show, but I know the result could have been better. Here’s to another week…I guess.
This is my outro for our radio show “Three Point Chatter”. I used pixabay.com for the background music and elevenlabs.io for the AI VoiceOver. I meshed the two audios together and created this relaxing outro. I hope you enjoy
I changed the assignment instructions a bit for what I wanted to create. Since our group has made some commercials for our characters, I made a bumper to play before the advertisements started. I kept it vague so it can be used for other purposes if we decide on it.
