Courtesy of Emma-Victoria Houlton.
Young Emma-Victoria Houlton felt on top of the world. She’d just earned a music degree and was playing in a band. There she was, at 22, recording with her band at the local BBC Radio station when all of a sudden, out of the blue, she fell in love. With radio.
Watching the producers and sound technicians at work, it just hit her. “Immediately, I was hooked,” she says. “I knew I had to be a radio producer.”
Emma had fallen hard for the art of audio storytelling and set her sights on a new career. She scored an internship at a hospital radio station, where she learned the ropes and helped produce a weekly morning show. And after a year of interning, she returned to school to pursue a master’s degree in Radio Production at Bournemouth University.
A fateful pitch
As part of the master’s program, the students had to pitch a radio documentary to the commissioning editor at BBC Radio 4. “It was a great opportunity, but I had to come up with a really great story,” says Emma. “That BBC editor had a reputation as being a tough critic.”
But Emma had a good ear for a story. She remembered an incident that her father had told her about his favorite band, The Who. Back in 1973, while performing at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, drummer Keith Moon downed a cocktail of horse tranquilizers and brandy and subsequently collapsed on his drum kit. Needing a drummer, Pete Townsend called out to the crowd “Is there anybody out there who can play drums?” A 19-year-old kid emerged, got behind the drums, and played the rest of the show.
Emma pitched the idea. The commissioning editor loved the story and couldn’t believe the BBC hadn’t already covered it. Thus a career in storytelling and radio production was born.
Building a career in audio
In 2010, with “Who’s Drummer” and a master’s degree on her CV, Emma landed a job as an audio producer with broadcast networks including the BBC, Sky TV, and RTE News. Over the next few years she worked on a range of successful radio programs, and was early to understand the potential of web programming—especially podcasting.
“I started doing podcast gigs on the side,” she says. “I’d come home from my day job and start working for my Canadian and American clients. Soon, I was earning more money at podcast gigs than at my full-time job.”
Through it all—from her days mixing music in a band to producing podcasts—Emma has relied on Adobe Audition. “I learned to edit on Adobe Audition and it’s the only software I’ve really used or needed,” she says. “Whether I am mixing music, editing a client piece, or stitching together one of my own stories, Adobe Audition has all the core tools in one app, and they’re really good. I don’t need to jump between different tools or spend a fortune on plug-ins. Audition has served me quite well over the years.”
