For my first story, I listened to “An Adoptee Reflects On The Mother-Daughter Bond That Carried Her Through the Loss of Her Birth Family”. This story stuck out to me between it was mentioned how the daughter was adopted from China during the one child policy, and she didn’t really understand the circumstances that her family had to give her up in. The audio was good quality, which I felt added a lot of emotion to the story as you could hear both the mother and daughter giggling and quietly smiling at each other throughout the story. The Story didn’t really utilize an interviewer, it was more like a conversation between the mother and the daughter and it was clear that they had had that conversation many times before. I particularly enjoyed this, as they both added very different perspectives to the story.
There was soft piano at the beginning and end of the story, which gave the story an even more wholesome feeling. They ended the story in a bittersweet way, talking about how they hope to one day find the daughter’s birth family, and the music made the situation cheerful once again because it forced the listener to think about how lucky the adoptee was to end up with a caring mother.
The second story I listened to was called “A Special Project to Keep Dad’s Memory Alive”. A daughter remembered her recently deceased father by completing a Mustang that he entrusted her daughter to finish after his death. The audio was very clear, but the interview was much less lighthearted than so you could hear less emotion in the audio. This interview only included music at the end, and it didn’t really add emotion. I felt it just closed out the interview in a way that didn’t just cut it off, which was still a productive use of the music.
This story was more of an interview than a conversation. It was mainly just the daughter speaking, with her husband chiming in every once in a while. Although I understand why this format was used, I personally feel that stories told as conversations are more impactful.
My biggest takeaways from listening to these stories are conversations are more interesting and provide more perspectives than an interview, and music doesn’t have to add emotion. It can simply be included to make the audio flow more smoothly.