I promised to reveal the location heard in this clip and this bonus clip, so here it is: Boston. I was up there on a junket, but really had the most fun walking around the city with an audio recorder. Switching from just taking in music through the earbuds to taking in the movements of a place or event through spontaneous audio was quite an experience.

I also came across this piece today with the engaging headline IPods More Popular Than Beer. Not much to the piece beyond its pointing out a wide open avenue for extending teaching and writing. Steve also recently discussed some of his podcasting efforts, and I really like the audioblogger channel he has set up for his classes. It seems like he's well on the way to streamlining the process of creating teaching materials and getting them to the earbuds.

Also this week, Jenny has posted about the enviable week she is spending at audio camp. She offers this helpful reflection,

- Think in terms of “scenes.” Audio documentaries need to create action and sounds/images within certain “sites” for the listener. This means that your sounds will need to create certain textures of scenes. Setting the action and narrative within scenes will help to make your words “thicker” for the audience. For example, one of our instructors played us an audio documentary about military wives, and the “scenes” included a woman talking in her kitchen. You could hear the sounds of kids playing around the table, while the narrative voice talks over the sounds. A little thing, maybe, but it gives the listener *some* image to hold see.

- Create layers and textures of sounds. More than just a music soundtrack (my audio drug of choice), textures of sounds include the kind of thing I just mentioned. This means, practically speaking, that you have to think about recording *sound*, and not just words for an interview. The sound should be 3-D so that scenes are created.

This seems like not only fantastic advice, but also an entry point for thinking about audio as not just stitched together samples, but woven and layered compositions. I really like the 3-D reference that complicates conceptions of linear sound. I can't wait to hear what more she learns about composing and integrating the process into teaching.

Finally, I need to make one connection with my previous post about e-books. One of the things that bothers me about Roger Sperberg's reaction to John Updike's speech was the sense I picked up in the podcast of Updike's struggle against new publication paradigms and media. Sure, it's easy to denigrate the speech for its unwillingness to seek common assumptions. But listening to the speech gives me pause. Perhaps I'm just too forgiving, but I read a confusion, a fish-out-of water effort to survive the e-book phenomenon. The key, though, is that I get this reading not from the words, which convey resistance, but from the sounds, the tone and resignation in the voice, which for some reason evokes in my sympathy. Here (to show I'm not a knee-jerk defender of Updike and the book paradigm) is a small snippet.

So, I'm eager to hear more sounds, to better learn to read them.