I spent time this week creating dialogue between my character, Natasha Sidorov, and Dr. Ravioli. The group agreed that text to voice generation would be best, due to the varied schedules. We created short MP3’s on www.elevenlabs.com and uploaded them on SoundCloud. Sarah Bradshaw volunteered to start getting them together in Audacity, Destiny had some time on Wednesday and Friday, during the day, to contribute to that and on Thursday, I assembled four clips to make the ending of the talk show, using Premiere Pro https://on.soundcloud.com/wHc7wmsgVqnEWPGa7 and Marisol recorded her character’s parts and sent them to SoundCloud, as well. I recorded six MP3’s during the week and saved them on Soundcloud. The final full show can be enjoyed here: https://on.soundcloud.com/1ENr7wciHvbgMJPP7.
The group was easy to work with and we were able to create a talk show with our characters interacting in various ways with Dr. Ravioli. It is my hope that in one of my other classes, next semester, I get the opportunity to use the Podcast equipment on campus. I believe that being together on location and reading our parts with good quality microphones will be a unique experience with minimal editing to clean it up, for a polished recording.
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.
Update from the radio show! My group was probably the best group assignment I have ever been in and I am a senior lol! My group was super accommodating and we worked well as a team! So shoutout to Pop Perception group for all their hard work! I had a really fun time with this project as we got talking about Marvel movies and Spider-Man!
We had been chatting for a while back and fourth and got to know each other a little bit better which I think helped with the brain storming part because we got to understand each other better!
I hope everyone had a good radio show with their groups!
This week marked the completion of our group’s radio show. I was in charge of primarily doing the final edit, so I will speak mostly on that. The script and dialogue choices were excellent from my team!
There were a good amount of changes from last week. Taking the feedback from Professor Bond and after some discussions, we realized that having a recording day and trying to record a podcast live would be a difficult task. We decided on writing a script and recording our own pieces of dialogue instead. We compiled all of this as well as our commercials and bumpers in our discord group chat for easy file transfer.
The downside to this was that we were not on the same page with each and every dialogue piece. A lot of our recordings were not in response to others, and I since I was unfortunately busy throughout the week, I wasn’t able to add my own dialogue into the script. As a solution, I used my character almost like a glue piece. I tried to make responses to what the other members said, rather than stating my own opinions on our topics. I believe that this made our podcast more coherent and gave it a bit more “flow”.
Since I was in charge of making the final product and editing the clips together, I decided to sprinkle in some of my flair and directed the podcast towards more of a narrative, one that blended each of our initial ideas from our posts together, and add some of the sound effect design we heard during the radio week and listening to ds106 radio. Much of the audio and background tracks were already included by the group members’ commercial and bumper projects, but I had to make my own additions for the introduction and closing, as well as adding some sound effects.
This is what some of my workflow in audacity looked like. By the end of it all, there were so many different segments I had to keep track of. Initially, I thought this would be just an easy mashup of all of the clips sent to me, but soon enough I was overwhelmed by the amount of clips I had to keep track of in both the audacity interface as well as on my computer files. I had to make a separate checklist to see which ones I’ve used already, and make a sequence of files that I can follow while staying on script.
The biggest hurdle I faced while editing was adjusting the volume of different segments. The talking, AI voices, commercials, and bumpers were not the same volume. Each separate “block” of audio had to be set at a specific volume, either raising or lowering it. I decided to group most of the same type of file into one block. For example, all of my dialogue for Hwei was put together in a single block. Both Rikaro and Isaiah’s voices had similar volumes, so I was able to put those two together.
There were some pieces of audio that were either super quiet or super loud, so I had to make a separate block for these and adjust accordingly. This made the UI very congested, as I had to scroll up and down to match the audios to the correct timing. I ended up with almost 10 different blocks! If I didn’t implement the organization tactics, I would have been very confused. It’s the same as writing a bunch of “spaghetti code” in programming. A lot of jumbled up code, but it’s hard to work with and it ends up becoming a bunch of nonsense.
Another hurdle I had to overcome was my own OCD. I ended spending almost 7 straight hours on creating the final version of this edit, and much of the time was dedicated to trying to perfect the timings of transitions, and how some of the music purposefully bleeds into the transitions when we came back to the discussion portion of the podcast. For example, I made sure that the end of the bumper music would fade out at the optimal time while I blended in Isaiah’s voice back in to create a seamless transition effect.
The edit that I’m most proud of is Hwei’s last piece of dialogue, where my character starts to disagree heavily with the direction of the podcast and the group’s clashing ideals of AI. To add an aura of suspicion and uneasiness, I added a backtrack to the dialogue portion, which wouldn’t usually be done for a podcast, but I wanted to add a some element of a radio story theme to the final product, just like the stories we listened to during ds106 radio.
While trying to find a suitable audio clip on freesound.org, I suddenly had the inspiration to add the soundtrack from one of my favorite games, Persona 4.
I played this game way back when I was a high schooler, but much of the Persona series music sticks with me to this day. I think this song fits perfectly with the vibe that I was trying to portray; a sense of mystery, uneasiness, and conflict.
To conclude this sequence, I added the phone hang up beep at the perfect part of the audio clip, where a few seconds has passed since Hwei stopped talking, but the audio clip continued to play. Just before the second sequence of the track went on, I abruptly ended it. I then purposely left a big gap between the end of the sequence and Isaiah continuing on with his show to make it clear that Isaiah was taken aback, and was thinking about how to proceed afterwards.
If I could have coordinated with my group AFTER having this idea, I would’ve had Isaiah and Rikaro react to my aggressive monologue, but I think it’s almost poetic that Isaiah brushed it off. Business as usual for the man with the agenda, as if nothing happened. Isaiah then announces that the next guest will be from Aggressive Technologies, completely disrespecting what Hwei said in the previous segment. I think this last portion of the show captured the storytelling aspect of our show, and I’m really proud of the editing and narrative direction I took.
Looking back, I definitely did not have to obsess over every millisecond of detail, but I actually had so much fun trying to create my own masterpiece! Definitely all part of the learning process.
This is what my final Audacity file looked like zoomed out. While this doesn’t look like that much, it felt like a TON during the process. There were small intricate timings in between each of those boxes of audio, and I learned to not take the small details lightly. Again, I am very proud of our work on this project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what others in the class think, as well as some of my close friends that I might send this project to!
This week has been very eventful in DS106. I have thoroughly enjoyed the process of becoming a radio show host. A lot of unseen work occurs in the process of making a radio show. I am extremely impressed with how radio host make it seem so easy. Especially nowadays with live radio, these host are not able to make mistakes. During our radio show there were many cuts and retakes during the process. However, we persevered and came out with an outstanding final product.
I am very excited to hear everyones reaction to the lives Himothy, Leo Storm, and Jonathan go through on a day to day basis. I hope everyone enjoys “Three Point Chatter”.
We collaborated effectively by communicating through Discord, where we shared our audio files and tools we could’ve used to elevate the quality of the radio show. We used a group chat to give updates on what we’ve completed and what needs to be done soon.
This week, our main focus was on crafting the script together. We all contributed ideas and worked on it simultaneously using Google Docs. We came to the conclusion that the host will ask questions on AI and Hwei and Rikaro will give strange answers that support it, but Kevin will react strangely to the answers and provide a more optimistic response.
Robin took our audio files and put it together to make the masterpiece we have now. It was a fun experience coming up with the story and script of the project. My group worked together so well and we all did our part.
This week was much more successful in making progress than my last week! I started off the week finally in communication with my group members who were all so kind! We figured out what movies we were each going to pick and established a team deadline to have our sections done by.
Three out of the four of us were going to each talk about one of the Spider-mans. I had picked Tobey McGuire, not realizing what I was getting myself into. I quickly realized that the movie Tobey was in was made in 2002 and did not have any AI aspects. He was also featured in No Way Home, but again no AI was associated with Tobey, his web was even made from within his body. I realized I needed to change my topic immediately! Our group was centered around Marvel, which besides Spider-man, I don’t watch other Marvel movies, so I was unfamiliar of the rest. However, I did know that Iron Man was the mentor to Spider-man. Therefore, I quickly switched gears and went towards Tony Stark and his companion JARVIS, who is all AI. Luckily, this made it so much easier to work with.
First I got started on getting a bit more knowledge on JARVIS and Iron Man. I took some notes and then started writing down my script. I chose to write it down so when I would speak, it would be organized and smooth. Once my script was done, I opened up Audacity and got to work! I added my intermission at the end and various other sound effects throughout my section. Additionally, Chuckles also was given an AI voice. To start off my script, I had a JARVIS like AI voice read in a good morning message that JARVIS left for Tony Stark in the movie. Then I went on to have Chuckles make a quick joke since that’s his thing. I then proceeded with the actual discussion afterwards. Here is my completed section:
My intermission was fully used in the final radio show, and along with that, parts of my intermission sound was played when transitioning to each of my team member’s sections! Luckily, with starting off a bit behind, I had my section in on time and we were all able to complete it into one amazing piece of work!
We got quite organized in week one. I thought we had planned for different people to put the different sections together and then one person takes the sections and make it all one. I had volunteered for the final edit and put the sections together. I did not explain well enough the idea and I was left to put it all together. (I realized this before Tuesday) I do not mind really. I think my character had the least number of lines to record. She isn’t chatty like the other characters. I had a vision any way and I think the most time. The group was supper prompt about meeting the recording deadline (Tuesday) and getting everything recorded and put on Sound Cloud. They have really been a joy to work with. We just all didn’t click the enable download button. Yes, that included me. I went and fixed mine and then sent out directions in the group chat. So here is hoping that it is fixed soon. I am probably losing a day to work on this project waiting for everyone to fix the download mistake. I hadn’t finished typing and the problem was being corrected. Really a great group.
Wednesday I spent putting the majority of A, B, and C together.
Well, I intended to get back to writing out the rest of the week but didn’t. I chatted with the group some more on Discord and we divided the editing duties up. I did A, B and C and other group members did the others. On Friday Morning I put the show together and saw we were short time by about 10 mins. We needed more dialog. So Laday Alice got more insulting, and Sol found more words to say. Summers made more commercials to add to the breaks. I think we pulled it together really well. We all have different class and work schedules but managed to find time to communicate and put something really nice together. I would totally do a group project with them again. I know I had a lot of fun editing the dialog and adding the sounds of the audience. I hope people like it as much as I loved putting my parts together.
I was the last one to submit my part of the show and man did I have trouble. I’ve said before I’m not very tech savvy and this was hard because I didn’t have time to go to the DKC for help. My part was mediocre compared to my groups, but I contributed in the best way I could by talking about a different movie than most and I did a small commercial on an AI product. My group was very nice and supportive to me the whole week and all very easy to work with. They all knew what they were doing. It was a fun experience to mess around on my phone and computer and write scripts for stuff. People running a podcast and radio show definitely deserve the love they get from fans because it’s a lot of work. It was a fun experience and I look forward to the upcoming weeks. Just want to put a public thank you to my group here as they have really good parts in the show and did really well. Peace!
The end is in sight. We have just about everything done!
This week consisted of us turning in our voice lines to each other through our Discord and shared Google Doc. We had a harsh deadline of getting these in by Tuesday so that we could patch everything together by the end of the week and have time to fix anything, if necessary! But the end is in sight, and we’re gonna get it finished.
For our voice lines, the majority of us used AI speech to text. A couple of us used ElevenLabs, but I’m not entirely sure what everyone used. Sarah ended up using her own voice, which is really cool! I considered, but decided not to because I don’t feel like I have the Sol vibe. I wanted Sol to be more monotone or just slow, but I am not good at talking monotone or slow. I’m actually happy with the voice I chose! It’s different from one I used in the past, but this one feels a lot more like them than the last one I used.
After putting in our voice lines, we split up to work on patching the audios together in parts. The parts were: introduction to the radio, introductions, interview Part A, commercial break 1, interview Part B, commercial break 2, interview Part C, and the ending. The intro and ending also include commercials and bumpers. We did these individual, and tomorrow, Sarah offered to patch all of them together for the final radio, and we’ll be done!
I’ve put together a couple, and we only have one left before putting everything together. It was easy putting it together! We put everything in SoundCloud and turned our downloads on, and I used Audacity and fiddled with the volume of some of the audios to make them sound easy. We also used our good friend Freesound for sound effects like clapping, cheering, booing, etc.
Overall, I’m so excited to see this completed tomorrow. And I’m very happy to have had the group that I have. I’ve had a really good time throughout this all!
