As some of our other classmates have noted happened in their experience, I also began engaging in postmortem analysis of my interview with Samantha immediately following the recording session. We discussed together what we thought our strengths and weaknesses were as interviewers, as well as the woes of outside noise. We recorded inside the conference room at The Red & Black and found that every car that passed and, in particular, every motorcycle that passed made a ton of outside noises that were ridiculously loud. Thankfully, we realized this early on and discovered a solution — we would pause immediately upon hearing an engine approaching or would repeat comments if necessary.
During the editing process, I noticed that I used a lot of confirming sounds like “uh-huh” and “yes” that were very distracting and that couldn’t be removed from my final product because they were in the middle or at the tail end of sentences, followed quickly by the continuation of what I had been listening to. In the future, I will be more mindful of this during interviews. Another thing that I noticed, thanks in part to a very helpful comment from our professor, is that my voice is a bit childish. I’ve been working on recording myself speaking in a lower tone, playing around with the way I speak to hopefully come up with a more natural sounding, adult voice.
In terms of questions that I wished I had asked, I wished that I had known ahead of time what Samantha was most passionate about. I didn’t give myself a lot of time to prepare for the conversation. In some ways, that made it more natural. In others, it limited my ability to ask deeper questions about radio, as it isn’t a medium that I’ve worked in extensively. I also wish that I had asked Samantha more about why she seems to prefer college radio over talk radio and differences set those two apart in her mind.