Before working on this assignment, my digital audio editing experience was only recording voice memos on my smartphone. I started by downloading Audacity and watching the tutorial video.
   Since some research shows that speech typically takes place at about 150 words per minute (wpm)(Pastore, 2015), I prepared a script of about 420 words to create a 3-minute audio file. I practiced reading it repeatedly to make sure the recording was easy to listen to and at a reasonable speed. After inserting sound effects, the narration came to about 380 words in three minutes.
   For the basic story recording, I used my laptop's built-in microphone and an external webcam microphone and recorded several times. Both recordings had noise in the background, so I tried to remove the noise with a noise remover in Audacity. I adjusted to normalize and compress, but I could not get the audio to be audible. I thought there was too much noise in the background. The noise may depend on the performance of the microphone used. This is one area where I think I can improve. As a solution to this problem, I recorded the basic story into my smartphone's voice memo and imported the file into Audacity for editing. I needed to convert the file format from M4A to WAV. I used a free online conversion application. I learned that Audacity uses the file formats WAV, MP3, and OGG, although I had never worked with either before. I edited to align the pauses between the sentences to make the narration more natural and smoother. Also, by compressing, I reduced the loud and abrupt sounds and made the low volume more audible. The amplification function was used to cut off some breath sounds. I could not find the equalization function with Audacity vel.2.4.2.
   I chose a sound source with different sounds from the left and right speakers for the Rio Carnival music for the sound effects. I also set the music to fade out and play for a few seconds at low volume without completely muffling the sound. The effective sound source for the Japanese festival (Omikoshi) was not loud enough, so I adjusted its volume when inserting it so that all three sound effects sounded about the same. I hope that the sound effects are natural and have an impact on the listeners.

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Reference

•  Pastore, R. (2015). Using Time-Compression to Make Multimedia Learning More Effect: Current Research and Practice. Tech Trends  59(2), 66-74.