Welcome to my emporium, traveler! You can rest up here to recover your HEALTH, or you can buy supplies from me. BOMBS, KEYS, anything your heart could ever desire. As long as you have enough GOLD, that is.
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, so this may not be the best song ever, but here’s my little synth beat that I made. I imagine it would be something you would hear in some older games at some kind of save point or a shop or the like.
You can try to run. She will hear you. You can try to hide. She will find you. You can try to fight. She will beat you.
Do not trust the rabbit. The Huntress lurks behind it.
Inspired by Anna the Huntress from Dead By Deadlight, hence the bunny mask as the icon. I’m personally a big fan of rabbit mask theming in games, shows, or other media, so her character design, while gruesome, is right up my alley. I’m not gonna pretend to have some well-crafted story for you, I don’t know horror well enough to tell a good story in that genre.
Other than that audio storytelling is fun, albeit very difficult, I was very interested in how Ira Glass described it. I definitely agreed with their point of us growing up thinking stories are “point->reasonings for point”, when for this and most advanced storytelling, it’s a lot more “point->bait->new point->new bait->etc.” with the occasional answer for a bait. Other than that, I’m not sure what else to say other than sound composition is not my forte.
What was easier or harder?
In terms of ease, naturally the Soundtrack of My/Your Life assignment was simple since it was just providing a list of important songs to myself. As for things that required a bit more effort, the Write Your Own Story was easier than I thought once I realized that I actually already had experience. While I’ve never used Audacity before, I actually had used video/audio software for a previous course (as well as trying to make my own YouTube series that I lost the file for and gave up on) using Filmora, and while it was a little bit more limited, being a free software compared to the subscription that Filmora was, Audacity wasn’t actually that different.
As for what was harder, easily the Chrome Music Labs. I have no idea how to do music composition, and while I was planning on getting my older brother (who is majoring in music and recently found himself quite skilled at composition) to help me out, he was busy with other activities and left me figuring it out by myself. I probably will not be making my own songs again in the future, it’s just not something I’m good at or enjoy.
What can I improve?
Firstly, I can probably work on how to balance audio and properly transition between audio clips more seamlessly. While it wasn’t bad, it was something I felt was slightly lacking in my Write Your Own Story submission. I would say my music composition skills, but again, if I’m not interested in pursuing that, why focus on that one particular skill? I guess if anything else, just work a bit more on general storytelling skills since I don’t think I’m atrocious at it, but I’m definitely no Edgar Allen Poe or anything.
Growing up, I mainly just reflected my music taste based on either what my family enjoyed or what was popular on the radio. As such, my two songs that I’d say define me in this stage are Shawn Mendes’s Stitches and Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. We were decently into pop music and alternative rock, so songs like these were my main taste.
Later Middle School:
For this part, I chose Panic! At The Disco’s High Hopes and My Chemical Romance’s Famous Last Words. I was going through a bit of an emo phase, as one does around the age of 13-14, but I wasn’t super into it, so it mainly just reflected in my music tastes. P!atD for when I was in a bit brighter of a mood, and My Chemical Romance for when I was feeling a little bit sadder or angrier. I do still lightly listen to both nowadays, but it’s definitely something that defines me.
Pandemic:
The COVID-19 pandemic hit me hard around this time, and my mental health declined quite a bit. Not to throw shade at the band, great music and all, but that’s probably why I started getting into Linkin Park, particularly Breaking the Habit. I was feeling a lot of irrational feelings of guilt for not being “enough” for my family, and thus was attracted to a song focused around breaking a bad habit to be “better”. I also was big on Twenty One Pilots at the time, so of course, I was instantly hooked when they released a song about their struggles with COVID, being Level of Concern.
Recovery & High School:
Between 2021-2024, I had done a bit of soul searching, gone to therapy, and most importantly to me, developed a true friend group for the first time in forever. I had often used video games as a bit of an escape from my struggles, so I had (and still do) listened a ton to soundtracks more than “proper” music for a good bit, hence the presence of Beneath the Mask from Persona 5 being on the playlist. The real catalyst for my growth mentally and emotionally, however, had nothing to do with that, and instead started when I joined theatre in high school. Disney’s Newsies was the first ever production I had been a part in, and while I could definitely give a decent story about how I got into it, that’s not relevant to this. What is relevant is that the mixture of the theming of this musical and my growing awareness of sociopolitical injustices led me to favor The World Will Know, as well as many songs with a similar vibe. I’ve come to try to embody a mindset of “this situation is shitty and I’m angry about it and I’m going to fight until things are better for myself and others”, and I feel this song embodies it.
Modern Day:
Nowadays, I often listen to more alternative or even “weird” music, with a particular focus on “I’ve left that dark point in my life and am never looking back” kinds of themes. All three of the songs that I’ve picked here embody that in my mind. Fish in a Birdcage is a super underrated artist who’s great with several genres, and Rule #46 – Poet is one of my favorites as something simple yet motivational. The Crane Wives are a lot more popular, and Icarus feels super empowering. Finally, Madilyn Mei is a small artist who embodies that “quirky and weird in the best way possible” energy I love, and I’m currently obsessed with Call Me the Bard.
You are a traveling adventurer exploring any kinds of wonders you can find, be them manmade or natural beauties. You heard about a mysterious cave off the side of the coast where many had gone, only to seemingly vanish. Some would say you were brave, others would call you foolish, but either way, you decided to visit this cavern to figure out what mysteries it held. (Begin recording)
(00:00-00:29) You stand here, at the mouth of the cave. You can feel the salty breeze of the sea against your skin, the cold wind blowing from within, and the faintest sound of dripping water deep inside. Sitting upon a new adventure, you steel yourself and push forward. You take a few steps into the cave and take in the atmosphere. The small streams rushing through from the outside, the quiet sounds of bats from within, and the sound of your own footsteps are all you hear for a bit.
(00:30-00:55) Suddenly, you hear a cacophony of falling debris behind you. You whirl around just in time to see the entrance of the cavern caving in before everything goes dark. You sit there in silence for a second, and then pull out your flashlight. It’s worn and creates an irritating hum, but it’s better than nothing. After a bit of contemplation, you decide that since you’re trapped in here anyway, you might as well venture further in and finish what you came for.
(01:00-01:45) As you continue forward, you start hearing the sound of water get louder and louder, drowning out almost everything else. After a while, you start to lose your sense of time, and wonder if you’ll be able to find a way out. Eventually, your flashlight gives out, but just in time, you spot a light coming through the end of a hidden passage to your right. You run in that direction, but as you start hearing the rushing sound of falling water, you could not have prepared yourself for what you heard.
(01:50-02:35) You exit the tunnel to find yourself somewhere unrecognizable from the coastal cliffside you started on. You find yourself surrounded by massive ferns and leaves on all sides, and in front of you stands a waterfall larger than you have ever seen before. The sheer sound of it almost drowns out your own thoughts as you wander, wondering how such a lush and massive jungle could have existed so close to people and never have been found. Eventually, you stumble upon a tree full of the largest fruits you have ever seen. While you don’t know how long it’s truly been, you feel your stomach rumble, and thus go to take a bite. However, right before you chomp down, you feel a sharp pain on the back of your head, and collapse to the ground. The last thing you hear is the sound of someone speaking before everything goes black.
And consider that the first chapter of this story. Will there be future installations? I don’t know, that’s a decision for future me.
For this assignment, I looked at The Moth, as their advertisement as basically “a TED Talk, but for the messy, imperfect, and poignant” was something that even someone like I (who doesn’t really ever listen to podcasts) could find interesting. I decided on the “AAPI Voices” podcast, which centers around people of Asian American and Pacific Islander origins.
The first story was about Helen Langley Wyss and her experience at a Korean spa called a jimjilbang. She was talking about how her time there helped her recover feelings of confidence in her body that had been lost over the years through bullying, toxic boyfriends, and seeing unrealistic standards through magazines. Over the course of her trip, she kept seeing other women around her age that she described as looking “nothing like those cosmopolitan magazines”, and yet she found them beautiful, and eventually started being a bit more comfortable in her own skin again.
The second story was from Hari Sanghvi, who talks about his insecurities with his naturally high, nasally voice that made him feel like “less of a man”. This continued through his dating career and even his work at a crisis center, with many thinking that he was a kid, a woman, or was gay. One day, however, he was hooked up to a call from a 15-year old girl who revealed that she had recently come out as gay and, for a lack of better words, not received very kindly by her family and was considering suicide. Hari confided with the girl that he also knew what it was like to be ridiculed for a part of themselves that felt out of their control, and by the end of the call, the girl said that she felt his voice was nice and comforting, which alongside the fact that he potentially saved a life, made Hari feel much more comfortable with this “unmanly” voice.
The final and longest story was about Wendy Suzuki, who was a neuroscientist with a particular focus on memory. She talked about how she first wanted to be a Broadway star, but was encouraged by her very serious family to go into the field of science, and eventually decided on neuroscience from a professor in college. She focused on the mechanisms of how memory works and became an expert in the field, but when her father started developing memory problems, she felt guilty that there wasn’t anything she could do to help him. This was until she eventually decided that since they had never actually done so as a family before, she was gonna start to say “I love you” at the end of her calls, and what surprised her is that despite her dad’s developing dementia, despite the fact that they had never done so before in their lives, he remembered her asking to do that and said it first every single time.
These stories were very heartwarming, and if I wasn’t sitting in a public cafe typing this down right now, I would probably be a bit emotional about them myself. And I feel that a large part of that can be attributed to not only the speakers themselves, but the atmosphere they decided to embody in the podcast. They kept in any kind of stutters, any trips over words, the applause or laughter of the audience, and made it feel very personal and deep. There was no music or sound effects, only light layering of voices when transitioning between storytime and intermittent disucssion, and it really felt like they wanted it to feel a lot more engaged with the story itself as opposed to having distracting stimuli.
Just going off of this video, broadcasting seems like something that’s quite difficult to master. As he said, it’s not as simple as stating a hook or main thesis then backing it up, but instead involves you constantly trying to “Yes, and…” your own story and making the audience question what is going to happen next. Balancing your bait between being too predictable and too farfetched is something I can imagine would be incredibly hard to get right at first.
Part 2:
THIS. I don’t quite have much (or any) experience in this kind of media, but I’ve definitely felt this in my art, in my academic history, and even in just conversations. Sometimes, you just need to look at something, decide if it’s gonna actually go anywhere, and if you feel like it doesn’t have enough potential to invest the time and resources into, you axe it. And ideally, you do this as much as possible. Spend plenty of time on the brainstorming process, experiment with anything that catches your metaphorical eye, and don’t be afraid to kill it off if it just isn’t sticking.
