For my oral history project, I wanted to interview someone from a different generation about a technology in which they are passionate about and would have a lot of information on. Furthermore, I decided to interview a close friend named Selma. who has been obsessed with music since she was a child. I knew that throughout the years of knowing her she had used several forms of more modern technology to listen to music, but I was curious about the type of technology she used beforehand. Therefore, I instigated a conversation about the technologies she has used to listen to music and how these technologies have advanced.

I was surprised to know about all the technologies that someone of her generation was exposed to and how vastly different they are from the technologies that we associate with music today. In other words, when finding that she used to listen to music on boomboxes, I was immediately interested in knowing more because I have never seen or heard a boombox before.

Another aspect throughout our interview which surprised me, was that she mentioned how in other countries, like those in Eastern Europe, CD’s are still a popular method of listening to music. Moreover, when the interviewee wanted to listen to music from her place of origin, she would have to retrieve CD players or boomboxes because that was the only way she could listen to music from her birth place. It was interesting for me to find out that countries across the world have different accessibility to technologies than in the United States.

The most prominent themes which surfaced throughout our interview were the myriad of technologies which she has seen emerge throughout her life to listen to music, and how different they all were from one another. In addition to talking about these different technologies which allowed for her to listen to music, I was most interested to hear about which technologies she preferred and whether she believed these enhancements were positive or negative.

When editing the interview, I decided to use Adobe Audition because I was familiar with its format after using Adobe Premiere, which has a similar method of editing audio. While the interview I conducted was on one audio recording, once I placed the audio files on the Adobe Audition track I decided to split them up. I split segments of the interview after each question and answer because this would make it easier for me to edit out any unnecessary words or pauses without having it effect more parts of the dialogue than needed. In addition, by splitting up each question and answer, I could organize more easily which parts of the interview I wanted to keep or discard for the final draft.