During the early 1990s at Texas A&M University part of my doctoral program concentrated on children's literature. I worked with a wonderful professor, Dr. Donna Norton (Through the Eyes of a Child: An Introduction to Children's Literature) who allowed me to explore the geography in children's literature and in particular, investigate adapting the dialog of children's books to sounds surrounding the settings of their stories. One of the projects I produced was a sound track for the book Country Crossing by Jim Aylesworth and Ted Rand, published by Atheneum in 1991. The dialog in the text is well suited for this kind of technology application because the setting, the geography of place in the story, is steeped in sounds and noises.
When I completed this work, the end product
was all in an analog format. I used a simple Radio Shack stereo mixing board, along with two cassette
recorders and tapes of sound effects to mix a sound track which
correlated with the oral reading of the text. It was a lengthy
process. I still have the master cassette of this project and
so I thought it would be interesting to attempt to adapt this
analog recording to a digital format and provide it as a podcast.
In keeping with tradition I mixed the sounds from the cassette
on the original Radio Shack board and played these sounds into
the podcasting software, Garage Band, producing the whole project
on my G4 Mac. I then edited the tracks digitally and added narration
in a digital format. There is a little hiss, and a little noise,
but perhaps that just gives this recording a little ambiance and
character in itself.
I was fortunate to be able to meet Country Crossing's illustrator,
Ted Rand a few years after the production of this sound effects
tape. At that time he lived on Mercer Island. He remains one of
my favorite illustrators and the signed texts he gave me those
years ago are part of my precious books.
I hope this podcast is the beginning of a series of these narrations
with sound. If you are interested in contributing a file, please
let me know with an e-mail. Anyway, after it loads up... tap on
the little controller above and give a listen to the FIRST podcast
of Children's Literature: Narration With The Sounds of Geography.
A production of Acoustic Space from the Geography Department
at Eastern Oregon University. Thank you for listening.
NEW
HEAR AND SEE A REAL
"COUNTRY CROSSING" TAP HERE!
Some Related Links
Country Crossing Jim Aylesworth Books Using
Country Crossing in the Classroom
Ted Rand 1915-2005
Take a look at Country Crossing from Amazon
Owl
Sounds, a great page!