Creating an "audio essay" was the first major assignment we were given; it took approximately three weeks to complete. In order to acclimate us to the art of creating audio essays, we listened to a few examples. I found "A Tale of Two Soundscapes" by Steph Ceraso most compelling and informative; our class even participated in a live tweeting session with Ceraso as we listened to her poem. It was a unique experience to see how social media enhances learning, and I was both surprised and pleased to see that Ceraso favorited and responded to many of our tweets!

Next, we were given the opportunity to take a stab at our own essay.

I chose to write about a personal experience -- something I rarely get to do in the college classroom. I looked at dozens of poems before finally settling on "Swim Your Own Race" by Mbali Vilakazi. Swimming was an important part of my life for almost ten years; I swam competitively in middle school and high school, competed in the Top 16 at state finals four years in a row, was elected team captain of my high school Varsity team, and considered attending college on a swimming scholarship. Enough resume talk, though -- swimming was an everyday challenge and I lived and breathed it. I swam (and fought) through long nights, early mornings, plateaus, and an almost career-stopping injury. I chose to focus on the nitty gritty and unglamorous aspects of swimming, because those are the most real and I felt I could really develop a genuine and gripping story from drawing on my experience. I chose to discuss my injury and the recovery process in relation to Vilakazi's poem. Here's the first draft of what I produced:

Audio Essay Draft

To be quite honest, I was not too pleased with my first draft. I felt like the poem and the story had a lot of potential, but the essay felt deflated and stagnant. I was also frustrated with the lack of sounds I had to work with; it was surprisingly difficult to find decent audio clips of pools and swimming on the Internet. I even attempted going to the pool on campus to record sounds, but there was too much background noise. For my final draft, I knew I needed to think more outside of the box for the sonic elements. Thankfully my knowledge of sonic analysis had improved in the weeks since my original submission, and I had plenty of useful feedback to use as a launching pad. Though my final product was the aim of the assignment, I believe the revision process was the most important and informative aspect of the assignment. I highly recommend including a revision process for those planning to teach with sound. Check out the video below to gain some insight as to why it was such a positive experience:

Audio Essay Revisions