About the Podcast

Victoria Lam (hard of hearing) and Ernest Chau (easy of hearing…?) goof around and discuss hearing loss, music, deaf musicians, and the Bee Movie.

Meet the Podcasters

Victoria Lam is a senior at Freestyle Academy, learning animation. She plays violin and definitely, totally, practices every day. She wanted to make this podcast because she is a musician with hearing loss and often feels a little bit misunderstood.

Ernest Chau is also a senior at freestyle academy, and particularly enjoys working in Illustrator and exploring Reason. Aside from freestyle, he enjoys practicing oboe, making reeds, and studying biology.

Introduction

For this project, our goal was to make a podcast that was current, relevant, and had a message to share. Because podcasting is so accessible, it allows people from many different walks of life to share their stories and lessons. For me, this meant helping people with regular hearing to understand hearing loss a bit better, especially in the music setting, where people are often amazed that I can play violin, while it is really not amazing at all. This podcast was inspired by the Sawbones podcast by Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband, in which the couple talks about different parts of medicine and medicine history in an accessible, lighthearted fashion.

Process

I wrote the podcast with Ernest Chau, and he did all of the audio production, because, well, you know, the podcast is kind of about how I’m hard of hearing. On my end, the process involved a lot of watching youtube, searching on Jstor, and asking Ernest which personal anecdotes would be suitable for the podcast.

To produce the hearing loss simulator in our podcast, Ernest used low and high pass filters on Pro Tools to emulate this simulator. Check it out!

The Podcast!

Reflection

Initially, Ernest and I only wanted to script out a few points and go with the flow while we recorded the podcast. As we started writing it out, I found out that I really wasn’t comfortable with that, and I wanted to fully flesh out what we would say in the podcast. In the end, we did that and I think that we were still able to get humor and the casual feeling across. For first-time podcasters, things might not go exactly the way you think it will, but make the changes you need to make and things will be fine.