Due Date: February 1
Course Points: 3000
Time on Task: 90 minutes (or less)
The Audio Playground assignments this term are intended to be fun sonic experiments in storytelling. Have fun, be creative, and surprise us in engaging ways.
This term, we are borrowing more than a few of Sara Geis’s Audio Playground Prompts, which she describes as “low stakes high risk.” They are available on the web for anyone needing an eardrum tickle. Here’s what she writes about the purpose of the prompts:
Each week, I’m gonna send you an audio assignment and some good links…. The point isn’t to make something good — though fine if you do — but to make something, and maybe even surprise yourself in the process. Let’s make room for the weird, the funny, the slightly tedious, the sexy, the surprisingly sad, and the totally no big deal. The project’s inspired, in part, by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More from the early 2000s. About that project, they wrote: “Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments were intended to guide people toward their own experience.” Ditto, about this one. Some of you might want to record the assignments in one take. Or give yourself, say, half an hour start-to-finish. Others of you might want to use this opportunity to craft something more intricate. Figure out what you need from this, then do it that way.
Sarah Geis
Your Task (Audio Playground Prompt Assignment #1)
Make a 1-minute audio tour of a place you know well, for one specific person.
Need some help figuring out how to approach the prompt? Here’s Stefania Gomez’s response, “a tour of my body for the worms who will decompose it when I’m dead.”
Stefania shared her response and Sarah uploaded it to the site.
Want more? Sarah helps us out by sharing responses on the “refrigerator,” so to speak: Results
If you need a GarageBand Template to help get started with editing, use our Interview I template and make changes. No script required for this assignment, but you might want a rough one anyways.
The Criteria/Specifications
- Runs 0:45-1:45 minutes long (roughly 1 minute!) – 500 Points
- Response clearly (albeit creatively and perhaps unusually) engages with the prompt – 1000 Points
- Audio is edited in some fashion that goes beyond “hit record, collect audio, make WAV/MP3” – 500 Points
- GarageBand Project, exported WAV/MP3 Podcast, and original audio file uploaded to Google Folder (3 files) – 500 Points
- 300-word ePortfolio Blog Post explains the prompt in your words and describes your idea for the Response – 500 Points