Design inspiration
I spend quite a bit of time listening to travel podcasts, usually during my commute. Some of my favorite are Women Who Travel, This Week in Travel, and Our Americana. There are a lot of really great travel audio storytellers, which inspired this project. I also read a lot of travel blogs and follow many global nomads on social media who focus on responsible travel. My favorite is Uncornered Market. Lastly, I also do my best during all my travels to be as responsible as possible. Being both an environmental advocate and a world traveler can sometimes seem like a contradiction, but there are many ways that travelers can work to have as little of a negative impact on the planet, it’s wildlife, and it’s people as possible if they travel with mindfulness.
Links to sites used for research
I used the Creative Commons Audio site that was suggested in our readings this week, freesound.org to find all of the audio besides my voice, which includes the elephant, the tiger, the water, the train, and the airplane pilot.
Details about design significance
The project was designed to give a few very easy steps to follow for someone who wants to take action to be a more responsible traveler but doesn’t know where to start. With only 2 minutes, the topics that sound be covered needed to be limited. I highlighted one area that I feel very passionately about, animals, that I felt needed to be said, as well as two more practical areas, packing and physically traveling. For a longer project I would have included information about responsible shopping, and supporting local economies as well.
Technical process
I did my best to find a quiet space to eliminate unwanted noise. I turned off the heater, closed the windows, and put my phone on silent. I also used the “record silence” suggestion before starting with my voice recording.
For the editing, I used a similar process to the “counting” Audition Tutorial assignment. I created the narration (voice-over), and inserted the soundbites from freesound.org into place. The timeline hierarchy was long because there were many different soundbites, despite most of them being quite short.
Love of Lost Travel 
Wonderful topic. I love the fact that it is informative and both challenging to tourists to be better. I would suggest you increase and decrease the animal noises and have them crescendo in and fade out so they are not so in your face sounds. I loved your ethic approach to tourism from animal to eco-consciousness. I would say the travel portion is less applicable as you can’t travel to some places without using airfare; and oftentimes those places are dependent on tourism to survive. I challenge you to think about tourism that exploits poverty. Have you seen the Netflix Special “Son of Patricia” by Trevor Noah? In it “Trevor speaks about a recent trip to Bali with a group of friends and how he felt guilty for going on a ‘traditional Balinese tour’ inside a man’s house.” There is an entire tourism industry in which first world folks are taken on tours of extremely poor households or orphanages. This isn’t oriented to helping the people in need but rather make a tourist attraction and the person who takes the tourists around some money. That is the greatest unethical tourist events I have seen. Just like you talked about exploiting animals; so the tourist industry is exploiting people. There is also an awesome series of articles about how volunteer tourism hurts more than helps; https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2015/may/21/western-volunteers-more-harm-than-good
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It was suggested that I phase the animal noises in and out so they transition better. There was also a suggestion to adjust the content and focus more on poverty tourism. While this is one very large area within ethical travel, I don’t think this should be a topic covered in this short 2 minute audio story. That topic is too important and would be a much longer and more in depth story, and is not the best place to begin in my opinion when talking about first steps to starting to think about more ethical tourism. It was also suggested that I not suggest using trains rather than planes, but I do very much feel that this is a good option when possible. It is often possible and people overlook the option, which was my point. On a daily basis when talking with my students about their travels this comes up very frequently. So while I appreciate the feedback, I am not planning to make these changes to the content. I will do my best to try and phase the animal noises in and out. I also agree that the elephant sound in particular is a little abrupt and awkward. I did not receive any other feedback before submitting this, but if I do I will do my best to incorporate that as well before Friday.
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To begin with, there many great aspects to this audio story, most notably the tone. The tone variety in the speaker’s voice fits perfectly with what she is talking about. Having a good tone in a story is very important because if the tone does not fit the story it will not sound as great. Next, one area your audio story could improve in is by starting the story with a little bit of music. If you use a little bit of music at the begging of the audio story it could serve as an attention grabber. Having an attention grabber is very important because it will grab people’s attention and make them want to listen to your clip. To conclude, another area your audio project could improve in is shortening the pauses between the tips you give. You could use the razor tool to edit those pauses out. Overall this your tips are awesome!
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