The sound of science

To put this project together I had to do a little bit of sound editing. I found a couple of large McLuhan clips available on the web, which included a couple of audio only television interviews and lectures he had given. The two best were his appearance on the Dick Cavett show and on Speaking Freely with Edwin Newman. The Edwin Newman interview was an hour long and actually provided the soundtrack for the YouTube clip mentioned in the last post. I had originally thought the audio from that clip was a single lecture from McLuhan, but I quickly discovered all of the qotes were taken from various answers during the Newman interview. Anyway, for this project I wanted to give students 3 to 5 minutes of audio, which they would then illustrate using images and clips. I have never needed to do any audio editing before but I have heard about Audacity in passing. It is a very simple (and free) audio editing tool which is so easy to use. I made six quick clips and showed the students how to get into the files and take out any gaps they wanted to, and even gave them the option of cutting up and splicing the individual audio clips together. I am really interested to see if any of the groups decide to do any major audio editing.