Composer’s Letter:

When composing this piece, I started to think about all of the events in my life that created or added to my role as the first child and oldest sister in my family. One funny event that kind of puts my personality into perspective is the fact that when I was two years old, I changed the diaper of my cousin who was also two years old. Of course, my mom and the other adults who were around to witness this were as surprised and amused as I was proud of myself. Regarding my role in my family, I thought that this event would be perfect to start with because it served as the perfect segue into describing my experience.

I intended to describe how being the first child and the oldest can usually place a ton of pressure on the person in that role. However, I still wanted to keep the energy light-hearted with a little bit of humor. One of my goals of this piece is to allow my audience to feel transported into this role and will enable them to picture themselves in each experience that I explained. I hope that my audience will be able to laugh but also walk away with an understanding of how hard it can sometimes be to be the person playing this role.

I tried to alternate my tone of voice and keep a certain rhythm while speaking to make this sound story easy on the ears, while also igniting the emotions that I wanted to my audience to feel while listening. I don’t like listening to the sound of my voice, so this experience was especially cringing, having to record myself, play it back and figure out how I should say things differently and then repeating until I was satisfied. One thing that got in my way was the fact that no matter how many times I tried to re-record, there were still words that I stumbled over. I am also not experienced with Garageband, so it was hard to use. Nonetheless, my youngest brother Noah, who is five years old and had to stay home from school today because he has asthma, does not understand the concept of keeping quiet to allow me to pay attention and record.

Using only sound, I think that I was able to describe my experience better than images or simply reading text could convey. The range in my tone of voice allows my audience to understand the points that I want to emphasize, parts of my story that made me feel excited or stressed, and merely the emotions behind the story which are very important in understanding a story. Text or images are not always able to convey emotion. However, using only sound similarly poses the limitation of maybe the audience not being able to visualize as they could with images or fully grasp your context as they could with text.

After listening to my sound story, does it come off as cheesy or cliche? Is it not detailed enough? Does it contain too much fluff and as a result is not concise? Is there anything you would recommend that I add or remove from this piece?

Sound Story