Working with sound

 Week 5 for Digital Material Preparation for TESOL is about Producing audio for ESL materials, and  we were introduced to Aviary as a sound editor. This site purports to be also and Image, Vector and Effects editor, but I have not tried those functions. The goals of the week are

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• locate and use an online tool-Myna to create a single track recording

• use Myna to add additional tracks then “mixdown” tracks for publishing

• use Myna to create alternate modes of audio distribution

• post an audio poem to a Moodle forum

I chose the sonnet  “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…”
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and made a recording on Aviary. The first attempt was not loud enough, so I re-recorded it.

Then I had the idea of adding some background music, so I started looking for some tune licensed under Creative Commons, and I found Michael David Crawford’s page, downloaded a beautiful song called Emergence, but failed to integrate it with my recording in a way that would make the result public. So I double-checked, and found that Aviary itself offers a long list of recordings, available in mini-files for better arrangement to fit a predetermined length.

I was successful, as you can see in How do I love thee, but – of course! – the embedding uses Flash and won’t embed in WP. The link takes you to the page where all the elements used are outlined.

I decided to accompany the recording with a Flickr Creative Commons photo, inserted below.

Uploaded to Flickr on November 6, 2008 by mikebaird

Before finishing, I fortunately remembered good old Posterous. I downloaded the mp3 Aviary file, attached it to an email. pasted the poem, inserted the photo and … magic! It worked.  You can play my recording with background music while you follow the words in this post.

I believe this activity can work very well in my Literature classes. In fact, I invited students to create a poetry anthology last year, including images, so they could complement this with background music in a post.