A Sound Project on Richmond’s Oral History: Social Justice, Art, and/or Manipulation

Our initial theory for the creation of the audio collage was to sample the word “Richmond” from the various speakers. In practice, this failed for two reasons. First (as a linguist could have told us), the word by itself was hard to capture, and the tendency across all speakers was to annunciate the final syllable very softly. Second, we felt the context of the sentences including the word “Richmond” was too powerful for us to ignore. For both of these reasons, we changed our working method to include expanded selections. After searching the accompanying transcript of each oral history for the occurrence of “Richmond,” we chose sentences and phrases containing the word to be used as raw material for the collage. We then used the open-source program Audacity to locate and select the sentences and phrases, copying them into separate files. In some cases we adjusted volume levels and used noise removal, especially for the older oral histories sourced from audiocassette; but beyond that, no effects were inserted. Once the files had been created, we used Audacity to create a multi-track collage