Audio Interview

“A lot of it is the politics of your particular city that you work for. They took away a lot of your ability to address things… People who are making those decisions really have no concept of how the police department functions…”

-Sam Cook, Retired SPD Officer

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Background

This piece came out of a multimedia storytelling assignment that required conducting and producing an original audio interview using the full toolkit of radio-style audio production: narration, actualities (interview soundbites), ambient sound, and music.

I chose to interview retired Seattle Police Department Officer Sam Cook about what actually drove him to leave the force at his 20-year mark. The Seattle Police Department had lost over 600 officers since 2020, which left the city with only one officer for every 860 residents, so the story had a clear hook instead of just citing staffing numbers, but I wanted to hear directly from someone who had lived inside the department about the factors that led him to his choice to retire.

The overall goal of the piece was to produce a tight, broadcast-ready two-minute segment built around Sam’s personal account of how city politics shaped and ultimately limited his ability to do his job. I paired his personal stories with supporting data from the Seattle Times, and I utilized sound design that supported the story instead of distracting from it.

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Scope

The scope of this project had many different pieces to create the final product.

Pre-Production Research:

Before the interview took place, I spent many hours studying audio storytelling fundamentals and listening to produced interviews on Transom.org. I really wanted to capture the right essence of an audio-interview, and I think that audio-research helped me achieve that.

Interview Prep and Execution:

I drafted at least 5 substantive questions that were built around the who/what/why/where/when framework and then I conducted the interview with Sam using a mic attached to my iPhone. Our interview lasted roughly 2-hours-and-45-minutes.

Production:

This was the most time-consuming piece of the entire project. It involved logging the raw tape, selecting the strongest actualities, writing and recording narration to frame the staffing statistics and set up his story, layering in ambient sound and siren sound effects for authenticity, and scoring the piece with a recurring music bed, then editing the full 2:45 of raw audio down to a 2:00 final cut using Adobe Audition’s multitrack view and razor clipping tool.

Peer Review and Revision:

Part of the project was to share a working draft of the audio interview with three classmates for structured feedback, as well as writing a formal self-critique, and then revising the piece based on the received feedback before the final submission.

Publication:

After I completed the audio interview, I wrote a blog post reflection of the entire process so that listeners had context about the piece. You can see that post here:

Final | Audio Interview Project

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Process

Before I began, I sought guidance from my professor on how many questions to prepare and how long to record, since I didn’t want to overwhelm myself with too much raw content or come away without enough usable material. Her advice was to build questions around who/what/why/when/where, preparing at least 5 questions, and then edit in your mind while recording so you can tell when you have enough. That advice directly shaped how I ran the interview, and I believe it is ultimately why I had 2 hours and 45 minutes of usable tape to work with (which was also very overwhelming).

Using Adobe Audition, I started with the raw audio, making notes as I listened to find themes that could tell a compelling story. From there, I cut pieces of audio that fit the narrative and I discarded as I went. Ultimately, I built the audio interview in layers, editing each track separately in multitrack view: creating the narration to frame the story, using Sam’s strongest actualities for the story pieces, adding ambient sound and sirens for texture and authenticity, and then adding a music bed underneath the whole piece so that it felt like the audio stories I listened to on Transom.org.

Next, I published the working draft version to SoundCloud and shared it for peer review before finalizing the piece. I also wrote a formal self-critique, noting on my own that some interviews I’d been listening to used too many or too-loud background sounds that distracted from the speaker and how that was exactly the trap I wanted to avoid in my own piece.

Only after feedback was received did I revise the audio based on specific and actionable notes. For example, one student gave feedback that the closing line about SPD’s hiring challenge needed a setup earlier in the piece and that prompted me to rework the opening so the narration foreshadowed the staffing crisis (the 600-officer loss and the 1-in-860 ratio) instead of only resolving it in Sam’s final line. Two other students both independently flagged one technical issue in how the music cut too sharply right as Sam started to speak. So, I went back into Audition and smoothed out the music fades.

It’s important to note that student feedback suggested I change the music to the piece. However, because I had spent time researching different kinds of audio stories, I knew what look and feel I wanted my story to sound like. Ultimately, I made the deliberate editorial choice to keep my music despite the suggestions to change it because I built the piece with the mindset of a talk-radio host who uses the same musical signature across every segment, so listeners instantly recognize the show. That’s a stylistic, branding-driven decision I stood behind instead of changing it simply because it was suggested.

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Lessons Learned

What went well:

My final grading feedback specifically called out that the music and sound effects were “just right and well-balanced throughout,” with additional praise on my use of the added siren sound effect, the use of the razor clipping tool, and how I stayed within the two-minute timeframe. All of this confirmed that the layered, deliberate approach to my sound design had paid off.

My professor also noted that I “made some solid improvements after our peer reviews,” which told me the revision process itself, not just the original recording, was where a lot of the quality came from.

The main challenge:

I think it goes without saying that editing 2 hours and 45 minutes of raw interview audio down to exactly two minutes was by far the hardest technical part of this project. Getting the .mp3 to land precisely at the 2-minute mark meant cutting a lot of content I liked. That tight edit is also, honestly, why the ending was the one note that kept coming up: one student had said it was abrupt in the draft so I extended the fade for the final cut, and my professor still noted in her final comments that the interview “stops a bit abruptly” and could use a couple more seconds of music before the fade. That’s a useful reminder that some structural problems caused by a hard time constraint don’t fully resolve with one round of revisions.

Outcomes:

The finished piece is a polished two-minute audio interview that I am really proud of and is one that my professor described as sounding like “something you’d done before,” with strong reviews on both content (in using The Seattle Times reporting to add credibility to the staffing statistics) and technical execution (by having clean audio levels, smooth pacing, and well-balanced sound design).

I’m featuring it in my portfolio because it shows I can manage an entire audio production pipeline, from interview prep, through multitrack editing, to public-facing publication, and that I know how to take detailed peer and instructor feedback seriously, while still defending a creative choice I had a real reason for keeping.