In the audio documentary below, I wanted to tell the speakers’ stories, but I couldn’t just have them talking for a long time, rambling on while I stuttered out my questions in between. To fix this problem, I went back to my knowledge of print interviews. When writing a print interview, I cut and reorder segments of what the speaker said so that I can tell a linear story in their own words. Then I glue it all together with pieces of my own commentary.
However, in the audio piece, I did not use much of my own commentary between segments. This is where music came in to play. The inspiration behind the music formatting of my audio documentary was the radio show This American Life. In TAL, music is used to fill the gaps between thoughts, to give listeners pause, and for drama. The music also gives a piece some of its linearity and helps the progression of the piece. Going off examples from TAL, I took to the Internet in search of free background music.
There is a website called the Free Music Archive, and it is awesome. Here I found more free music than I could possibly listen to. Now I needed criteria for choosing the correct music for this piece. I wanted something light, with a driving rhythmic beat and a fairly repetitive melody. In choosing background music, you don’t want to pick something too “interesting”. What makes good background music for a video or an audio segment does not necessarily make good listening music, and vice versa. The rhythm and repetitive melody come in handy when making an audio piece because segments can be copied and inserted at varying points throughout the piece. If you listen closely, you’ll see this effect at work in my audio documentary [I am sly audio guru ;)]. Eventually, I wound up choosing the track “Happiness Is” by the artist Podington Bear. As all of the music on the Free Music Archive is, as the name suggests, free, I assumed that all of the artists therein were posting their music and beats for free with the hopes of getting exposure through the creative works of others as a means to commercial success. After reading more about Podington Bear, however, I learned just how naive and cynically capitalistic I was! This guy is a record executive at a small label out of Portland, and he was publishing his music under the identity of Podington Bear just for the fun of it. He became so popular that the story of the bear was covered by many outlets including Morning Edition and Wired.com. And of course, he was so successful that he got picked up by Google, This American Life, and NPR to do work. Did I mention This American Life? Is my ear spot-on or what?
Anyway, another important aspect of this audio documentary is the introductory commentary. I thought it was a good way to begin the piece when I first started out, but in retrospect, I think I could have served the piece better with a different introduction. While the research study that I chose to start the piece helped me find a way into the segment, I think it did not, in the end, really serve the goals of the piece, which were to simply explore the experiences of someone with an accent at Pitt.
As my untold history has unfolded, I have repeated the same themes of alienation and disconnect; however, as this piece shows, not all ESL students necessarily embody those themes. While Jorge and Anna struggle with their non-native tongue, they have found ways to be successful and happy in the United States. I know both from personal experience and they are very engaging and interesting people. I think this is an interesting side of the story, a side that I had been avoiding because I was so much more interested in covering the story from the perspective of the alienated and alone student.
Of course, in all of this, another question arises: Am I getting the full story when I interview these students? Who wants to admit they are sad or alone or feeling out of place? Especially the ESL student, a student who has gone to extraordinary effort to be here. I think this is an interesting question to keep asking throughout, and it is a question that I started with in my visual essay. How do students go about having a “normal” life while dealing with the nagging uncertainty of whether or not they actually “belong” where they have chosen to go. The untold story continues…
Take a listen to my audio documentary and post your reactions and thoughts in the comment section.
https://soundcloud.com/kmiltenberger/audio-documentary-accents
Useless Buzzing Noises 