I used "Big Zero," a monologue for male teen actor, for this assignment:
I chose this monologue because I wanted to speak about something from a male's perspective, and I also liked the fact that the monologue had a sports theme. Sports can be an allegory for so many things, and I thought that it was very interesting that it related football to war.
I used four tracks in this radioplay. The first track is the "Big Zero" monologue itself, the second track is side noise/people speaking in the crowd, the third track is applause before the monologue comes in (an amalgamation of three different recordings of applause), and the fourth track is the applause that runs during the course of the monologue (an amalgamation of two different recordings of applause). I recorded the first track myself, and was assisted by my friend for the second, third, and fourth tracks. I normalized all the tracks, and added other effects individually to each track. I added pitch shift downwards and reverb to the first track, to give it a more prominent, almost unearthly bass sound, and make it sound like it was in a very echoic room. I added pitch shift upwards and phaser to the second track, to distinguish it from the first track, and to also add some comic relief during the course of the serious monologue. I added a fade in to the third track, so that it wouldn't start so abruptly, and added a fade out in the fourth track, so it wouldn't drop out so abruptly.
In addition, I chose to have the intro applause be on channel 1, the main monologue on channel 2, the side talk on channel 3, and the applause during the monologue on channel 4. I chose to pair the main monologue with the applause during the monologue in order to the effect that people everywhere were surrounding the speaker. The people on the same side of the speaker only clap, while the people on the other side make off-hand remarks relating to the monologue.
Note: I had difficulty getting the timing right straight from Audacity, so I manually fixed the time in the Chuck code. The result is the same, however, and all four channels are utilized.