I really struggled with my audio essay. The prompt was extremely exciting for me and when I did get the idea to pair the migration crisis in Europe with a poem on the Irish Potato Famine, I was very excited to begin work. However once I had my basic clips collected, finding the right way to compile them and keep the attention of the listener, which also maintaining the somber tone, was extremely difficult. I tried to take sounds from videos that featured refugees, at crowded train stations, European boarders, and boats, as well as more basic sound effects like wind and water. Though I struggled with creating a sense of immersion that comes easily with background music, I am quite happy with the essay and the more stark,  new-story, style that I adopted, an interesting format to use when also discussing a poem. I tried to capture my process and how I improved my draft in the video below as well. 

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I decided to include the clip below because it was my first project with Audacity. This was simply meant to be a sound compilation of multiple types of sound. I made this piece celebrating the strange work and stories of Oliver Sacks, who had died earlier that day.  I enjoyed using audacity a lot though, when I was compiling so many clips for the essay, the see number of layers became overwhelming.

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