As I was looking through the possible assignments for this week, I stumbled across one that was a challenge to better speaking skills. This is something that felt valuable to me and my future. As a future educator, I will be speaking every day. I know that I always talk too fast when I present and teach, so I watched the video and tried to plan my pauses and be more confident in the words that I was speaking. It is not perfect, but this helped me learn new skills to use when I teach. Focusing on how I was presenting information was very mind-opening.

Relaxation music comes in all forms. There is some really bad relaxation music and some that work really well. In this assignment, I am combining all of my favorite relaxation sounds into one to make the ultimate relaxation audio. I like the idea of using various sounds to create an overlay that is peaceful. While making this, I tried not to place sounds over top of one another that created a loud or eerie sound. The sound that plays all the way through is the ocean and waves. You will hear a train passing by, which reminds me of when I was younger. Birds will also chirp, which is very relaxing and peaceful to me. The ringing of the bells makes me think of Christmas, which is one of my favorite times of the year. This all ends with relaxing music that could put me to sleep. Hope you find this relaxing!

This audio story contains various sound effects placed in the order of events of my life during January 2022. It was not an easy month for me. Honestly creating this audio story turned into more of a reflective assignment for me. I started off with shot glasses clinking before the ball drops on New Years’ Eve 2021. The champagne popping is reflective of 2022 beginning. I spent this time surrounded by my entire family and my closest friend. This was an awesome time… but little did we know that it would expose all of us to COVID-19 and the majority of my family would end up with the virus. The next sound is coughing and is representative of my family’s time with the virus. Next is an ambient car drive as I return to Mary Washington after isolating. Next is ambulance sounding, representative of a tragic loss in my close friend group. Tears come after because tragic events take a good amount of time to get over and I spent a lot of time in reflection. The music at the end was tagged as hopeful. After spending much time in sadness and reflection, I am hopeful that the rest of this year will be better.

I used Free Sound for the sound effects in this recording and Audacity to edit and put the sounds together. I used this assignment to continue to help my understanding of Audacity and to learn how to mix multiple sounds together.