This week I worked on an audio story about…dogs! (Surprise surprise ha!) As a dog-obsessed human, I find it both comforting and interesting how others relate to their pets. I don’t feel crazy! With so many of our friends and relatives having dogs instead of children, businesses catering to dogs and friendships formed through doggie play-dates; my curiosity got the best of me. Why are some of us so obsessed with our dogs?

A couple of weeks ago, I made a draft of this audio story and met some nice people who didn’t look at me funny after asking them about dogs. Let me tell you, a lot has changed since then!

We’ve been “sheltering in place” because of COVID-19, so, whenever we’re outside walking Mocha, we actively avoid people. Mocha has been living his best life though, getting to spend all day with his humans. The humans on the other hand, are trying to find toilet paper. (Sad but true)

Three weeks ago, I talked to people who were out and about walking their dogs and got about 25 minutes of raw material, which I then edited and trimmed into a 3 minutes audio story. Unfortunately, re-doing interviews or finding new people to interview was not possible due to the COVID-19 situation :(. Hence, I mainly changed the following:

• My narration. One of my classmates made me re-think the way I structured my story, so I changed the information to make the story more entertaining and relatable. I decided to keep the story very similar because I honestly really liked it. It felt like a happy-feel capsule.
• Fixed the volume and echo of my interviewees. Through youtube tutorials and google searches (#theinternetisawesome), I learned some tips and tricks on how to improve the echo and volume of the clips. The difference is subtle, but I think it improves the overall quality of the audio. As always, I wish I had more time to play around with Audition and try different effects.
• Adjusted the volume of the music bed and ambient sounds. A comment I received from several people was how loud the background was, which was distracting and made certain parts of the story difficult to understand. Since the song I used for my background had a lot of variations in the track itself, I selected a portion and looped the song. The sound was steadier that way and I don’t think you can tell the difference.
• Fine-tuning sighs and coughs. I also edited out some of my interviewees’ sighs and coughs in order to achieve a cleaner clip.

I’d love to create more audio stories on the greatest love story ever: humans and their dogs! In the future, I’d love to have some equipment other than my cell phone to get better sound quality. So far, I’ve been using an iPhone 8 and Bose headphones, which do a good job but after listening to some of my classmates’ work, recorded with more advanced equipment, you can definitely tell the difference!

That’s it for us! How have you been doing during this tough time? Mocha and I will continue to take lonely walks and enjoy our comfy couch.

Wags and kisses,

Mocha’s Mom