The Life of a Youth

Reflection of “The Life of a Youth” by Emma and Sydney
When initially putting the two narratives together, we first decided to try a visual collage. During the time in which we were trying to come up with meaningful symbols for our stories, we realized that we had more options of audio symbols than visual ones. This led us to the decision to change our course and create an audio collage. We started with the two sounds that best showed the type of literacy from each of our stories, the sound of a pencil moving on paper to symbolize writing a poem and the next sound was pages turning for reading a story. As the writing and the flipping of pages were so integral to our narratives we chose to use repetition of the sounds to emphasize to the listener their importance to our collage. A main element of one of the stories was running out of time so we chose the hurried music with the beeping/ticking sound to symbolize that. We also chose to align the hurried music to the ticking of a clock to heighten the feeling of the panic that is felt when time is running out. To contrast this combination, we chose calm music to start the collage to more represent the other narrative. With the repetition of the shared elements of the narratives being an exception, we used proximity of the sounds to convey which story they were from. The calm sounds and the sound of the kids were started close together to show the relationship of them being from one narrative. Then the same for the frantic music and the beeping from the other. By arranging the alignment of the sounds over the course of the collage so that the calm turned into the panic, we were creating our own combined story of a gradual change in emotion as something stressful happened. We finished this collage by using the alignment of all the sounds abruptly ending, leaving the listener with the feeling of being left hanging.