Lesson 4: Audio Media and Information

• audio media - a kind of media resources which uses recorded audio materials for communicating and delivering information.
• types and categories of audio information: radio broadcast, music, sound recording, sound clips/effects, audio podcast.
• radio broadcast - live or recorded audio sent through radio waves to reach a wide audience.
• music - vocal and/or instrumental sounds combined in such a way as to produce beauty of forms, harmony, and expression of emotion.
• sound recording - recording of an interview, meeting, or any sound from the environment.
• sound clips/effects - any sound, other than music or speech, artificially reproduced to create an effect in a dramatic presentation, as sound of a storm or a creaking door.
• audio podcast - a digital audio file or recording, usually part of a themed series that can be downloaded from a website to a media player or computer.
• different ways of storing audio media: tape, CD, USB drive, memory card, computer hard drive, and internet/cloud
• tape - magnetic tape on which sound can be recorded.
• CD - a plastic fabricated, circular medium for recording, storing, and playing back audio, video, and computer data.
• USB drive - an external flash drive, small enough to carry on a key ring that can be used with any computer that has a USB port.
• memory card - (aka flash memory card or storage card) is a small storage medium used to store data such as text, pictures, audio, and video, for use on small, portable, or remote computing devices.
• computer hard drive - secondary storage devices for storing audio files.
• internet/cloud - website or file repositories for retrieving audio files, and more precisely the files are stored in some datacenter full of servers that is connected to the internet.
• audio file formats: MP3(MPEG Audio layer 3), M4A/AAC(MPEG-4 Audio/advance audio coding), WAV, WMA(Windows Media Audio).
• MP3(MPEG Audio Layer 3) - a common format for consumer audio, as well as a standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on most digital audio players.
• M4A/AAC(MPEG-4 Audio/Advanced Audio Coding) - an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression.
• WAV - is a Microsoft audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs.
• WMA(Window Media Audio) - is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft and used with Windows Media Player.
• Characteristics of sound: volume, tone, pitch, loudness.
• elements of sound design - the objects or things that we have to work with:
• dialogue - speech, conversation, voice-over.
• sound effects - any sound other than music or dialogue.
• Music - vocal or instrumental sound (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.
• silenced - absence of audio or sound.
• Principle of sound design -the techniques for combining the different elements or objects.
• mixing - the combination, balance and control of multiple sound elements.
• pace - time control. editing. order of events: linear, non-linear, or multi-linear.
• transitions - how you get from one segment or element to another.
• segue - one element stops, the next begins ('cut' in film).
• cross-fade - one element fades out, the next fades in, and they overlap on the way.
• V-fade - first element fades to inaudible before the second element begins.