Podcast Weekly Diary

 Week 1

After having found out the member of our groups we had to organize a survey, we decided that other than questions asking for demographics factors and what topics they were interested in as psychographic factors , other questions such as whether they listen to the podcast actively or passively (as background noise) would be vital. 

The questions we decided to ask were

1.What Gender are you?

2.What Grade are you in? (To Find Out Age)

3.What interesting phenomena in modern music do you want to cover?

4.Do You listen to podcasts often? if Yes how much?

5.What is the mood of the podcast? Serious? Conversational? or Humorous?

6.Do you want the podcast to be Scripted or Unscripted

7.How many hosts do you want in the podcast?

8.Do You listen podcasts actively or for background noise?

9.Do You listen to Music often? if Yes how much?

10.Would you like to analyse a song lyrics and breakdown the samples

11.If you picked yes in the last question, would you like us to recommend new music at the end of the episode

12.What type of music do you listen to? ( You can pick more than 1 )

This way we would see how our podcast will be presented and the themes we will present.

Link to our google form with questions 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dbvlYPQzuwnEmCP7fsY9awdyPRY8D8w_ukX1rcR89As/edit

 Week 2

We found out what we wanted to do with our podcast, the first episode will discuss the 27 club and will be hosted by Angelo and Jason, i and Lakila meanwhile will have to take ver the song analysis episode which we will model over other podcasts such as "Dissect" on Spotify.

Following our audience's request, the format will be conversational and humorous, there will be lots of music involved due to the fact that many use it as background noise, it will not be totally unscripted where we will have bulletpoints noted but not detailed enough that the conversation sounds scripted and practiced as in 5 Minute History's episode on chocolate shown to us by Mr Nick in class. 

Genre: Pop Culture Nerd Niche Podcast, Similar to Dissect

List of Name Ideas:

TraverseTheVerse

MusicBuzz

TrackbyTrack

Beauty and the beat (As in music beats) --> Out of brand, hosts are all boys no female representation, this would fit if one host was a male and the other female

LyricalSurgeon

Lose It To Music --> Liked it because it rhymed

Lyrics Sounds Decibels (LSD)

 Final Title Decided: Lyrics Sounds Decibels

From the result of the survey we deduced that the podcast will have multiple hosts in an unscripted conversation, the tone will be humorous and there will be lots of music as it is used for background noise.

The topics that will be covered on the first two episodes are

• Ep. 1:The 27 Club

• Ep. 2: Listen To Us Overanalyze Harry Style's "As It Was"

 Week 3

In class we got to see podcasts such as Pod Save America and You're Dead to Me and saw how their intros differed in terms of pace and transitioning to an advertisement.

I used a software called audacity to make our intro,  

I thought since the podcast's name is LSD maybe we should have the host slur at the intro as if he is using drugs, we tried asking Angelo to do a slurry unclear voice while "being hip and cool" but the final result did not please us thus we decided to keep a normal voice while changing the background noise which should conform to a person's expectations of a singer on LSD trying to interpret lyrics, an idea i had was to have songs in foreign languages other than English which should not be understandable for our mainly Indonesian audience to be reverbed and slowed which led to me remixing the German song shown above.

I decided to sample the track "1nstagram" by the German artist Cro from the album "TRIP" for the first episode, the second episode will sample a track called "Good VIBES" from the same artists and album, i decided to slow down the songs and reverb them and cut some parts of the song that i desire and loop them before adding my voice into the intro. 

Album Cover of "TRIP" (2020)

I sampled the 2 aforementioned tracks by playing them on my laptop and recording it with my phone before airdropping the back to my laptop and dropping the tracks on "Audacity to be played with", i decided on these tracks in order to emulate the sensation of being under the influence, namely when people are under the influence of drugs as depicted by media they tend to slur when talking and often speak incoherent words, slowing down the song and reverbing it creates the effect of making sound like the singer is slurring, the fact that the song texts are in German gives the audience an impression that the singer is saying incoherent things, a german track was chosen due to the similar diphthongs German and the English language have which results in them having similar pronunciations, thus making it sound like the singer is singing gibberish in English.

I had to teach myself how to slow and reverb on the spot, my main source was this youtube video by CASH2RICH called "HOW TO SLOW + REVERB (AUDACITY TUTORIAL 2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFSn8YxT4uI

 Sampling the track "1nstagram" by looping a part i like using Audacity

" The Final Result"

In the first episode's intro i took a part of Kanye West's song Remote Control which was featured in his 2021 album "Donda" and minimized its volume and once again cut it and loop a part i wanted in order to though this time i did not change the pitch of the audio (reverb) or slow it down.

Album Cover of "Donda" by Kanye West (2021) 

For the outro i wanted to keep the same "under the influence" concept, once again i reverb and slowed a part of a song called  Rozovoye Vino made by the artist Eldzhey featuring Feduk, the reason i chose it was the same for Cro's "1nstagram" and "Good Vibe", i wanted to keep a consistent theme to the name LSD, the song which is in Russian would make it sound like the singer is spouting gibberish and the slow and amplified sound makes it sound like he is sluring.

Today i also added a disclaimer for the first episode as recommended by Mr.Nick due to the fact that we bring up alcohol and drugs along with descriptive scenes of a murder as they cannot be separated with our topic. 

 Week 4

Me and Lakila did some research on Harry Style's song "As It Was" and we had to improvise a lot on the meaning while using information from public interviews such as one on IHeart Radio to support our interpretations.

We read articles by IHeart and looked through Genius.Com to see what other people interpret from the song

an article by IHeart Magazine

An interpretation from a User on "Genius.com" in the page featuring lyrics to Harry Sty;e's "As It Was".

Additionally 

Today we started writing our script for the advertisement, we formatted it after Sunny in Philadelphia podcast by adding an auditory transition and having a free lowing chat and it is scripted. We researched people who were using LSD to see how they talked, we wanted our intro to have someone "energetically sluring" to emulate someone on LSD but this idea is dropped as it may make people think the podcast is unserious. 

 Week 5

Today we did a lot of research on our thumbnail, we decided that our logo should conform to those of similar genres namely music and pop culture podcasts, but we will remove their seriousness and try to model it after some other comedy podcasts as our viewers demanded that our tone be conversational or humorous. 

I researched podcasts such as Ryan Higa's Off the Pill where we were inspired by the pill logo as it would fit with the name LSD meanwhile i have looked at Instragram accounts such as Konbini, Le Reglement, and PULS Musik to model our instagram podcast account after.

Logo of Ryan Higa's Podcast "Off the pill"

 Week 6

All attempts of recording were a bust due to a blackout that occurred mid recording, despite that we still droned on for 5 more minutes before realizing our time was up and that we had nothing but radio silence to show, we will attempt to book another meeting next week where hopefully things will go better. Mr.Nick suggested we recorded our podcasts into segments. 

The main part of the 2 episodes have been recorded by today, the main thing left it to edit it, Angelo has edited and cut the sound using an app called Band Lab, the progress of the editing will mainly be in his blog.

Meanwhile i have tried making the intro using programs such as Garage Band after hearing Jason's first try at an intro and thinking it was too dull and does not fit with the brand well. Using Garage Band i played around with instruments, synths, and adding in my own voice recording which for me was too complicated.

 Week 7

This week we heavily worked on our thumbnail, Angelo picked up Mr.Nick's suggestion and made a thumbnail featuring a tie dye pattern associated with hippie culture while retaining a picture of a pill though it is a minor detail of the thumbnail.

I have succesfully created an account for our podcast called Lyrics_Sounds_Decibels where i posted artist trivia and announced our next episodes as if it were an account for a real podcast, most inspiration was taken from accounts like ColorsxStudios and Dissect.

 Week 8

By this week Angelo and Jason had just finished editing the podcast, the first draft had to be tweaked to include a disclaimer for the first episode while making sure the gap between the intro and the start of the podcast is not too sudden. We replaced the intros with my final versions i made using Audacity. 

I decided to add more to the instagram account, i decided to "sell" merch after finding jackets that had the writing "LSD" online and posing it as our own content, other than that i also propped up fake instagram stories that included polls using websites like  Fakedetail.com as it was not possible to make instagram polls using my computer.

I had to embed my audio files for my blogpost , because of this Mr.Nick taught me how to code HTML in order to include the audio file by setting it on preview.

During this week i took time to write a critical self reflection which i have posted in my blog, i have trouble embedding my Prezi presentation so i will attempt to ask for help as internet searches have proven to be futile.