It’s finally official – I’ve submitted my final assignments for my master’s degree and the course is finished! Now all I have to do is wait for my grades and of course diploma. To help wrap up my experience, I am continuing my posts of a few things I’ve learned from the program.

Previous to taking the MA course at UCLan, I didn’t have much experience with audio editing. I had only played around with it a bit for a sound poetry class in undergrad for my Creative Writing minor. And in fact, previous to starting the course, I never would have guessed that audio editing would have been something that we learned as part of the program. Using the editing software seemed daunting at first (wow, does Adobe Audition have a lot of tools and features to use) but once I got the hang of it, it was quite fun! 

One of our assignments for the first semester was to interview one of UCLan’s authors, which in itself is an extremely cool opportunity, record that interview, and turn it into a podcast episode. I think that learning how to use Adobe Audition is a valuable skill, so having the practice of creating a cohesive podcast, while sometimes frustrating, was beneficial.

The author I interviewed was Tamsin Mori, who wrote The Weather Weaver, and her second book, A Gathering Storm, came out in March of this year. After going through and editing the audio file of the interview recording, we had to add opening and closing music, which was challenging, because we had to adjust the fade in and fade out to make sure the volume levels fit seamlessly into the voice audios. I know the intention of UCLan Publishing, in tandem with the publishing course, was to create a podcast titled UCLan Publishing: Behind the Books. As I write this, the podcast is still in its development stage and not yet available to the public, but maybe one day you will hear my interview with Tamsin Mori on one of the episodes!

In general, while most people don’t automatically think of audio editing when considering publishing, learning about it opened my eyes to what else the industry entails. There are so many other avenues to pursue within publishing, and audio editing might be one I consider when seeking opportunities later down the line.

Thanks for reading! Stay safe and stay happy.