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The (Yakety) Raven

Made by Jeffrey Bradley

Create a whimsical or otherwise lighthearted situation using Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven".

Created: November 8th, 2015

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Product:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7l6gRvmpQGtU0laYmtBTWwxQ2s/view?usp=sharing

I combined audio from a reading of Poe's "The Raven" with the song "Yakety Sax" in Audacity. Both pieces of audio were taken from youtube using videograbby. 

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Intention:

I intended to create a lighthearted situation out of what is accepted to be a sad and ominous piece. 

I never really enjoyed serious stories, nor did I ever understand why anyone would want to feel sad or hopeless in their spare time. So I took something serious and added the silliest background music I could think of to the least serious portion of the story. I wanted to laugh at Poe.

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Context:

The portion of "The Raven" I included can be interpreted very differently when taken out of context. Excluding any mention of Lenore, the story becomes about a man who lets a talking crow into his house and argues with it despite knowing it cannot respond meaningfully. It's actually very silly. That story would do better with lively background music and canned laughter than it would with the dark piano that often accompanies it. 

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Process:

I would have preferred to record my own reading of the story so that I could add my own intonation and feeling to the work. However, the juxtaposition of the serious voice with the music in the background may work just as well. 

The best readings I found unfortunately included music in the background, which would ruin the effect I wanted to add. The one shown above was the best silent reading I could find. 

I had initially wanted to use the entire poem, but found the content of the narration to be far to dark to alleviate with a silly saxophone. Thus, I had to narrow the poem down to it's least dark stanzas. 

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Reflection:

The product I created wasn't particularly difficult to create and, thus, not impressive by my own standards. However, I do think it is humorous at least on the surface. I can't assume the viewer will interpret the selected portion of the poem the same way as I do, which may limit the humor others may find in this.

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1 comment · Latest by Roger Liu

I liked the idea of the piece, since mixing the somber narration "The Raven" with the slapstick song Yakety Sax definitely changed the experience of listening to the piece. At the start I thought the music was a bit quite, but I began to appreciate it more as the music went to its more franctic parts, while the narration remained slow and deadpan. Some moments in the piece that I thought were really good were during the pauses in the narration, so to improve the piece, perhaps you could edit the narration so those points are more prominent. Overally, excellent idea, but the execution could have been improved with some slight adjustments.

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Create a whimsical or otherwise lighthearted situation using Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven".