After our own exercises in creating audio segments, I have come to see how much more difficult it is to create an audio essay than a video one. Video uses our sight and sense of sound, while the radio ones solely utilize sound.
Listening to Infant Mortality from Michigan Radio, I thought about all of the different sounds I was hearing as well as the topic at hand. I had heard of this issue before in a public health course I took a few years ago. It is so striking to me that the main message we hear in the media is that there is an amble amount of teen pregnancy, and it is priority number one to stop teens from having sex. Becuase this issue strikes up a debate, it gets a lot of attention. However questioning the affect of latent stress from racism on infant mortality rates is a topic that people do want to talk about. The solutions presented were all in the realm of possibility, and I hope that there is more of a conversation on this topic in other forms of media.
This piece though utilized a number of experts as well as personal stories of women to create a piece that was both intriguing and informative. There was music that aided in the transition between the separate pieces and interviews. It was a really smart choice to use piano being played by the son of one of the women who was being interviewed, it added to the feelings of gratefulness to her son as her other child did not survive.Throughout my listening I was thinking about the amount of time that goes into editing these audio pieces and being able to keep track of the interviews. Being able to successfully edit the interviews and add music is much harder than I had imagined it to be. It was still hard for me to follow along to voices for the entirety of the segment, but I found myself scrolling through the transcript below the player. I was hoping for some pictures of the women and their children or some additional information about them. But it was only the words that I was listening to. I think that to keep listeners on the page the whole time and to engage with the topic, there needs to be something that the online listener can do with their hands and eyes.
Sam Says Stuff 