Interview with Daniel Bendersky

Daniel Bendersky won 1st place in the 112/112H: Multimodal College Writing Best Text Contest for "Speakers that Bump Hearts" (multimodal) and 3rd place in the 112/112H: College Writing Best Text Contest for "Speakers that Bump Hearts" (alphabetic).

Audio

Interview with Daniel Bendersky audio.

Transcript

DA: Hello and welcome to an interview with Daniel for the Best Text Contest. Daniel, can you share your name and the title of your essay and tell us a little bit what it’s about?

DB: Hi, my name is Daniel. The title of my essay was “Speakers that Bump Hearts,” and the essay was basically about studying music’s effect on clinical psychology and whether music can be used as a mental health tool in specifically young adults and teenagers to help them in a mental health setting.

DA: And you also did a multimodal version of that essay as well.

DB: I wrote a research paper first basically that cited a bunch of sources, and then I adapted that paper into a multimodal podcast that incorporated more music and audio elements. And I kind of completely got rid of all the technical parts of the research paper and adapted it for a wider audience.

DA: Can you share the inspiration behind your essay, or what motivated you to write about this topic?

DB: Yes, totally. So I've been a fan of music my whole life. I mean, I've gone through my own bouts of mental health in the past, and music has always been there as a tool for me to feel better. And I was curious about whether other people feel the same way, and specifically, if there was research done on music's effect on mental health. As I began researching the topic, I found specifically that a lot of research had been done about young adults and children on music, but some studies failed to produce a lot of kind of analysis of music that had both lyrics and audio. A lot of studies only focused on specifically lyrical content or audio content, but not them together as like a full song package, which stood out to me.

DA: Can you share your writing and creation process and any challenges you encountered along the way? 

DB: Yeah. Honestly, the hardest part was figuring out where to start and find those big research papers that specifically were about the topic I was looking for. Because a lot of research papers, when I searched up audio or sound or clinical psychology research, they were focused around more soundscapes, or like doing more audio visual things. And I had to spend a lot of time finding the niche, but once I found it, I was easily able to expand. The reason was because there was these meta studies that basically do a wide array of their niche. And with those meta studies, they cite a lot of specific studies that you're able to go further into, and they also elaborate on what those studies show. So it made a lot of it made a lot easier to find those smaller studies by using those meta studies as a pathway.

DA: Wonderful. So was there a moment during your research or in class, or when you were writing, where when the piece really started to come together for you or clicked?

DB: I think it started come to come together after I had done my research and I was looking for how to like put all the pieces together and how to order my essay. And the way it came together for me was thinking about a broad view of music and then narrowing it down into specific examples and breaking it down by specific content. I eventually came the conclusion that I want to basically have my paper propose a new type of study that could be run, which was what the conclusion of the final paper was, was proposing this new idea for a study and then advising on new ways to continue such research. And basically, I want to first start off with a broad scope, narrow it down, and then wind it back out to multiple avenues of different research.

DA: Did you try anything new with this essay and/or the podcast? A different structure, voice, or approach.

DB: I never recorded a podcast in a media studio before. I had my own microphone back home, and I had made a documentary back in high school, but relying purely on audio was interesting, and I never really focused much on audio mixing. When I would record the podcast, I had a lot of doubts on whether I would be able to get the recording done in time, because the library had a specific window booked for the recording. I also found that the rooms were very, very hot, which kind of contributed to the issue of trying to just get it done and over with. But once I had all the audio files stored and ready to go, the audio mixing was pretty easy to put together.

DA: What part of the essay and the podcast are you most proud of, and why?

DB: I think I'm most proud of how I was able to take a piece that was so specific and correlate it so differently for different audiences. So I think what's truly amazing is how the essential content and the message remains the same, but how different the two pieces actually are. They bear like very, very little similarity. It's very unrecognizable. 

DA: Can you talk a bit more about that? The differences between both the result how you went about creating.

DB: Well the research paper came first. And in the research paper, there was a lot of technical citations straight from the original research papers that I had cited. But when it came to writing the multimodal piece, I basically had to boil down all these specific details into something that was easier to understand for a general audience. So I was basically spending time summarizing these specific details and relating it. I also wanted to leave gaps for audio content, which is why, when I was writing the multimodal piece, I specifically identified moments where I could put in supplemental audio that had related to the topic. And that was definitely tricky part for me, but I really enjoyed doing that as well.

DA: Great. How did your instructor or peers influence your writing journey? What did you learn about your writing process?

DB: Ooh, so my instructor, Gretchen, she was phenomenal, and she did a really, really great job on guiding me on where to go with the second piece, because once I had written my research paper, I wasn't actually sure if I want to do a podcast. Yet, it seemed fitting for the audio format, but I was struggling to come up with a way to generalize this into like something that could be shown to a generic audience, since it was so technical, and she basically gave me the advice of trying to summarize it piece by piece, which I hadn't really thought of doing. And I think that extra push really helped me to convince me to do a podcast, and also to make it less technical, because I was originally considering a podcast that would still be aimed at a technical audience.

DA: And what about the peer review process? What was your experience with that?

DB: The peer review process was useful. I don't remember a lot of the details, but it definitely helped me in understanding what a person who had never seen the content had trouble understanding. Because obviously, as someone who had written the technical side first, I had trouble understanding what parts are actually easy to understand if you hadn’t read the papers and which parts are not easy to understand. And having peers look at it and tell me, “Oh, this part's confusing,” “Oh, this part's already making a lot of sense. You don't need to explain it in such details,” or “You can go into it more” helped me identify which areas I needed to either generalize or write more specifically.

DA: And how did you hope that your readers would respond or connect with your pieces?

DB: With the research paper, I wasn't as concerned about the response. I was just kind of putting my ideas out into the world and trying to make it as technical and correct as possible. When it came to the multimodal piece, I was concerned a lot more with the kind of persuasive argument of trying to convince people that this actually works if they don't have the right background. And I was also focused on using the audio as a persuasion tool. So I would have specific musical clips that kind of evoke that sense of healing or nostalgia that I was describing via the text. And I would also have not just music, but background audio play, like people talking in a coffee shop, or the sounds of waves crashing to kind of demonstrate how music and audio in general, had such a powerful effect over listeners.

DA: What did you learn about yourself as a writer while working on this piece? 

DB: Honestly, I think the thing that I learned the most was that I was able to write a persuasive piece. Because I had always not had much trouble identifying good evidence and putting it together; but I always had trouble with my papers in the past, especially in high school, coming up with the reasoning and making my argument conveyable to a general audience. And I think this paper helped me identify that I'm able to do that and identify the strategies that make it happen.

DA: How do you see your writing fitting into your studies or plans beyond this class?

DB: Ooh, that's a tough question. I've actually been using writing more this semester than I have in the past, because I’ve been taking computer crime law, which is a writing class where you just read law briefs all the time, and do write up law briefs for those law cases. And I found the ability to summarize very specific information into something that’s conveyable really important when writing a law briefing. Because you're taking a lot of complex citations and putting it together into something that can be understood by just someone who doesn't have the legal background to identify all those citations. And I also think I'm considering going into a more humanities-oriented field in the future, like going to law school or working in public policy around computer crime.

DA: What was there any part of writing this essay or the podcast that inspired you to do that, or was it the class?

DB: I think of mostly the class itself, but I think having the confidence that I can actually write to a general audience well going in definitely helped, because I always saw myself as a technical person who struggled to write like a relatable paper.

DA: So speaking about relatable papers, did you draw on any personal experiences? And I know you mentioned that a bit, but was that something that you thought about in terms of how to relate to others?

DB: Yeah, definitely. I was trying to understand. I was trying to take my personal experience and my connection with music and evoke that same sense of connection to a general audience. So I try to, I would try to have a wide variety of music in the paper, try to appeal to different genres, and also just my personal connections with both the lyrics. The actual title, “Speakers that Bump Hearts,” was a lyric from a 21 Pilot song that really connected with me as a great title for the paper. And there was also a lot of songs that I personally connect to throughout the piece as well.

DA: What advice would you give to future students thinking about writing or college writing?

DB: My best advice would be to go for a paper that truly feels like it's something that connects to your life, like it's something that you care about and you want to write about. And think about it from the perspective of the audience: if you were reading some— if you were looking at news online or just on a blog online, what kind of paper would you like to see? What kind of topic would you be interested in reading? And you go out there and you write that paper, because it's in your hands to put into the world that content that you want to see. Also, pretty much any topic can be written about, and there's always a way to connect it to something important. So pick a topic that you really care about, and I promise there's a way to make some like important connection to the world out of it

DA:  Fantastic answer. And our last question is, what does winning the Best Text Contest mean to you?

DB: To me, it means that my work was valued and that it means something to someone, and that's all I really care about. It means that someone saw my essay and said, “Wow, I relate to this. I connected this.” I had never seen myself winning a writing award. I had basically, just forced myself to apply to the initial writing contest as a throwaway. I never thought I would win. I kind of completely forgot about it until the email was sent to me that I had won. And I was really, really shocked when I saw that, because it definitely is completely outside the field of what I normally do.

DA: Thanks, Daniel.