How I Created my Draft of a Short Interview for SoundCloud: Chatting with Dona

For this assignment, I decided to sit down with my partner, Dona. If you don’t know Dona, she’s originally from Rwanda, and she has this incredible perspective on life that is worlds apart from the usual American “hustle.” For this two-minute interview, I didn’t have time for a standard interview about her background or goals, but I wanted to have spontaneity and surprise to find a piece of wisdom that defines how she sees the world.

To achieve the interview goal in length and spark, I didn’t give her the questions ahead of time. We started off super easy by my asking her name and noting she didn’t sound as if she grew up in the USA. Then I confirmed with her about her main love language (spoiler: it’s gifts!), which was a great icebreaker, and what her favorite present was. The next or “main” question was what she’d talk about if she had to give a 20-minute speech to a big crowd. Without missing a beat, she chose “compassion.” Listen to the interview for her choices and her explanations.

Note: I know the assignment is for a two minute interview and this draft runs about thirty second over. I await feedback from reviewers of this draft before I cut any of the original content because I want to know what part of the interview was most interesting to the listeners.

Tweaking the Audio: Behind-the-Scenes

Since I recorded this on my smartphone in a room that definitely wasn’t soundproof, I had my work cut out for me to make this interview much better quality. My main tool, aside from the microphone and sound recorder on my Nokia, is Adobe Audition.

One challenge was due to my sitting close to the mic and Dona standing a bit farther away. There was a difference in volume and frequencies in the raw audio. Moreover, the phone’s mic picked up a hum and I heard a bit of hiss in the background. Read on for how I handled it.

1. The “Clean Up”: I used noise reduction tools to strip away that annoying smartphone hiss and the background hum from the room. It’s amazing how much better it sounds once that’s gone.
2. Balancing the Voices: To make sure Dona sounded just as clear as I did, I used Adobe Auditions’ Normalization to bring the audio more consistent over its length. Then, to eliminate any sonic difference between the near mic volume and Dona’s volume, I used Audition’s Compression tool with defaults. This step really served to level both voices in the mix.
3. Add music plus fade ins and out. For the intro and outro, I used a clip from Enisa, one of Dona’s favorite artists. I faded the clips in at the start and gave it a fade-out just before the end of the interview.
4. Balance all volumes into a Draft Final Mix: I made a choice to keep the interview with no background noise or ambient sounds. I really wanted people to just focus on what Dona’s prosody, meaning her voice, timbre, pronunciation, and expression, as well as her answers.

Why Enisa and Afro-Beats?

I went with clips from Enisa’s “Love Cycle” because her music has this great Afro-beat vibe—it’s upbeat, soulful, and feels “happy.” As I wrote above, I intentionally left the music out during her actual answers because I thought that I’d prefer the listeners to focus on Dona’s answers and speaking style rather than hearing a toe-tapping song. I may revisit this based on feedback from my peer reviewers of this draft.

Interview over Two Minutes

Right now, my draft is over is the 2-minute time limit, by about thirty seconds. If I am strictly held to this limit, I anticipate cutting out the answer to my question about her favorite gift. It’s a bit of a bummer because during the interview, I discovered her favorite gift was one I gave her myself.

What I Would Rework for Another Draft and for Final

Next interview, I will insist my interviewee sit closer to the smartphone (assuming that’s the microphone) or I would use a lavalier or stand microphone for each of us. I’m happy with the tools in Audition that served to eliminate a lot of hiss and hum, as well as help me mix in the intro and outro music clips. I await to hear what my peer reviewers take on the draft, and I’m ready to get back into Audition to make those final edits and post it here with my changes and the revised audio. For the final, I will revisit the fade in/outs, all volume levels, and most likely trim the interview to two minutes.

Figure 1: The 2-minute Dona Interview Mix in Adobe Audition