Narration and Music

By Autumn R. Neal

The introduction video to the Edgar Snow Project was always meant to have narration and I knew from the beginning that I did not want to record the audio myself. It would be awkward hearing your own voice over and over as you’re trying to perfectly edit an audio track. Initially, I thought I’d ask one of my classmates to record it until I had a groundbreaking idea. Actually, it wasn’t groundbreaking and I should have thought of it long before I did. My good friend, Erika Baker, is a theatre actress in local Kansas City theatre so I asked if I could hire her in exchange for some baked goods. I already had some audio editing software and an external microphone so she came over and after a couple practice runs we had a nice audio track.

Foto6

In reality, we had some technical difficulties and, in the end, recorded one long track full of errors and laughter which I edited out later. I’ve been working on layering the voice and music tracks and attempting to artfully match them up with the scrolling photos. Over the past few weeks, I had tried to have a couple other people record the audio but it didn’t work out. Throughout those attempts though, I learned that a lot of people in their mid-twenties do not know who Mao Zedong is and don’t know how to pronounce his name. Granted, they weren’t history majors, but I think he’s a pretty important historical figure. Is this an example of why we need public history?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *