Week 2 – Samples, Narration and SFX

Week 2 involved a lot of my time spent online searching for good recordings of famous speeches by John F. Kennedy and good poems that were written about the movement. My idea is to have either a poem or a song at the beginning which will be read out by someone and recorded at the university, this will hopefully give the soundscape a good powerful opening. After thinking about the intro, I decided on using ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ which is the national anthem for the United States. This will be used as a bed of music for audio samples to go on top of from the main four individuals that my project is focusing on, this intro will be roughly a minute long before a gunshot rings out before the first movement of the piece begins. Below is a very rough idea of the intro:

The tune of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is being played on an acoustic guitar which was found on YouTube but in the upcoming weeks this will be replaced by an actual recording of myself playing the US national anthem on my acoustic or electric guitar to bring a more authentic element to the intro. After listening back to the rough idea for the intro I have been thinking of what I will base the following movement about and I have decided to tell the story of JFK and how he came to be in office, his stance on the civil rights movement and his assassination. This will be done with samples, narration and through the use of music. Overall, I feel that so far the piece is coming together and that I have made a good start to the project. I have also been researching the civil rights movement and have been watching videos of speeches and rallies online as well as notable movies that highlight racism. One of these movies is Hurricane which is a biographical film based on a boxing champion who was convicted for a triple homicide.

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