The original task from Week 1 was to take a picture of the contents of our “bag” and explain its significance. Now, we are changing Week 1’s task into a different semiotic mode that must be delivered in audio form. With a bit of hesitation and needing inspiration, I searched through classmates who may have already completed the task. There were not many at the time of searching. I did, however, stumble upon Simon Worley’s podcast. I thought it was brilliantly done, hilarious and authentic-sounding with appropriate sound effects. I wanted to be original and so brainstormed other audio genres. Eventually I settled on the most appealing one to me: Breaking News.

I referred back to the general template of an anchorman and a field reporter and wrote the script. Initially, my plan was to have this framed in the future looking towards the past, of humans looking back to an ancient artifact attempting to explain and interpret its contents. However, throughout the process of writing and imagining myself in a more technologically advanced society given what we already have established today, I decided that it would be funny to have robots delivering the message. And so, I changed the names of the anchorman and field reporter to more futuristic-sounding robots and implied that humans lost the battle with the robots in 2023.

With regards to voice acting, my initial intentions were to speak in a terrible accent with the iconic reporter tone and to enlist my husband’s help with his deep voice as the anchorman. As we rehearsed, I couldn’t stop laughing because he was talking like a robot with their irregular tone inflections and elongated stresses on syllables. I knew that the perfectionist in me would not allow me to complete the task on time. Then, I had an idea! I could record a clip of my voice and have an AI generator complete the rest! Thinking this would be authentic and efficient, I tried this only to feel utter disappointment. It did not carry the punch and the humour I always strive for in my creative assignments. And so, I searched for a speech-to-text application and finally arrived at a podcast creating application “Drift”. After fiddling around for a while with the text, voice, tone and linguistic design, I decided to add authentic layers of sound that would lend credibility to Breaking News which includes intro and outro music as well as background archaeological sounds.

This task reflected clearly what The New London Group (1996) asserted, that “all meaning-making is multimodal” (p. 80). Conveying information is not 1-dimensional and despite this being an audio discourse, many other modes of literacy were employed. This process also required fluency in textual, digital, cultural and social literacy.

References:

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.   Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.