First, you need to think of a place that might be interesting to visit and write about.
Then, you will visit your chosen site and observe, taking field notes and collecting audio and visual data.
Next, you will compose a brief essay on your chosen place based on your field notes and any additional research that is helpful.
Then, you will mix a voice recording of this essay with audio or visual data captured at the site you are writing about.
Finally, you will create a blog entry as a home for your audio essay, including a selection of your essay and any images you captured while on your site visit.
The most difficult part of this assignment will be the editing of your audio essay, because this is a technical skill that many of you will have little to no experience with. I will be learning how to create podcasts along with you and so my hope is that we can share our growing knowledge as we go. Time will be devoted in class to various "how-to" tutorials. I will also lead you through the process of uploading your audio file to the blog, which will automatically publish it as part of "The City in Literature" podcast!
The most basic fulfillment of the assignment might be a reading of your essay with a simple audio "quote" of sound captured at your site, accompanied in the blog by a few images of the site. Mixing in musical intros or interludes will only make your presentation more professional and evocative.
Check out this recent NPR call for listener recordings for a similar "assignment." You could submit your podcast to NPR for publication! Here are some captured samples of city audio at Soundcloud.
Here's a link to the Beijing installation from an urban sound art project called "Invisible Cities":
Editing
To begin, with you will need to choose an appropriate editing software. Audacity and Garage Band are two popular ones.
You can find Apple's "Support" for Garage Band here.
Audacity's "help" pages are somewhat dense, but here they are as well.
I've culled some of the more pertinent help pages from Audacity here.
