Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

on becoming an audio engineer in like… 24 hours

I swear it felt like my laptop was threatening to shoot into space every time I opened GarageBand trying to put together my final audio file. After many, many, many searches on Youtube for the perfect sound effects, listening to every single robotic text-to-speech voice online, and bombarding my storage with mp3 files, it’s finally completed! Contrary to my previous journal entries, the actual creation of the recording was not painful at all. In fact, mixing all of these sound bytes and voice notes was actually really fun. Did I have any idea what I was doing? Absolutely not–but this was the first time in a while that I had to actually learn something completely new to me. Being able to envision the sound I wanted to achieve in my head, and then moving around little colorful squares on the track to make that sound a reality was immensely satisfying. Embarrassingly, I now understand why teenage boys are so obsessed with learning how to DJ…I felt like I was cooking up some crazy mix in the studio, ha ha ha.

As the quarter ends, it’s quite interesting looking at my previous entries and where I thought this project was going. I had pretty rigid preconceptions on what I considered to be “translanguaging”, “codeswitching”, and “auto translation.” I thought it literally had to relate back to ethnic/cultural languages like English, Spanish, Vietnamese, etc., which freaked me out because I have a very limited grasp on anything that’s not American English. However, being able to experiment with the language of generic codeswitching was the backbone of my project, I think; to take poetry, a form that I consider myself to be pretty comfortable with, and reimagine it into an auditory framework completely challenged how I conceptualized my words being received. Especially after listening to Lily Hoang’s lecture and discussing her collaborative piece, “Broccoli”, I finally understood that there are really no rules. Hearing that they wrote “Broccoli” with a diasporic audience in mind (not native-born Vietnamese readership) helped me detach that bond between language and place that I just assumed was always there. In general, I feel like the course of this class has helped me deconstruct these literary constructs I’d subconsciously adopted throughout my academic character. An audio project doesn’t necessarily have to be a song, or a podcast, or take the form of an audiobook: it can borrow elements from each and be its own thing. Though my project is based on poetry, it incorporates music and immersive sound effects, which sort of elevate it beyond just a spoken word poem in my opinion. I’m proud to say that I consider my final project its “own thing” too, and surprisingly, I’m pretty okay with leaving that categorization somewhat undefined.

-sydney