Character Emotion: Dreaming: Radio Bumper:

I chose to use 4 different sound effects to show fear. I used a heavy breathing sound, a scream, a creepy violin tune, and a scary laugh. I used audacity and messed around with their volume levels so they would layer evenly. I also loved the timing of having the laugh at the end. It turned out really well in my opinion.

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/emotions-through-sound/

So this assignment was to create emotion through sound. The emotions I chose to create were stress and anxiety. When looking into “soundscapes” I noticed that most people attempted to create a scene that would evoke powerful emotion. I wanted to create a scene of loneliness in a way that felt inescapable such as being the last person on earth, or being the only person trapped in a space station or submarine. I used a combination of vocal samples, audio clips and custom synthesizers all with heavy amounts of distortion including time stretching and pitch modulation to create this sound scene.

The assignment “emotions through sound” (3 pts) was harder than I expected. I wanted to do this assignment because I know that different sounds can make me feel happy or sad, and I wanted to play around with sound effects more. At first, I was positive that I would create a relaxing sound by using four sound effects, but the more noise I added, the less relaxing it got. I was going to convey a relaxing day at the beach, with nice ocean waves, but I found out that oceans are noisy and I find noisy stressful. Therefore, I changed gears and decided to create a stressful or anxious sound. I kept the original idea of having the ocean in the background, but this time I added noises that stress me out that have to do with the beach. Before you can relax on the beach, you have to deal with so much stress! This is what stresses me out about going to the beach:

I used four different sounds to create this stress/anxiety: “ocean waves” by darren1979, “traffic horns city nervous busy” by klankbeeld (cars honking at each other), “flock of seagulls” by justkiddink, and “baby crying” by panikko. All of these sounds are from freesound.org. I kept the noise of the ocean in the mix because it is a reminder of how nice it would be to be at the ocean instead of stuck in traffic. I imagine the scene when you are about a block away from the ocean and can smell it and hear it, but you can’t get there yet. This tantalizing sound only leads to an increase in anxiety for me, because I just want to be there already!! Traffic noises are pretty universally stressful, because nobody likes being in traffic (especially the weekend beach traffic that you inevitably get stuck in). After I had these two sounds down, I didn’t know what to add next. I thought about what I didn’t like about the beach (which is not much because I LOVE the beach), and I thought: seagulls! Seagulls steal your food, they are loud and obnoxious, and they are completely unafraid of humans. They stress me out because they are so annoying. After that, I added a baby crying because I do not know how to stop them from crying, and they have such powerful lungs. I imagine that I am almost to the beach, when traffic just comes to a standstill, and the baby suddenly starts crying. What do you do? Stress out, that’s what. In this way, a pleasant trip to the beach can actually be incredibly stressful, and I hope this emotion comes out in the track (and I hope you don’t get too stressed out listening to it).

This is the Emotions Through Sound assignment that is three points.
In this assignment, I wanted to convey calm emotions. When I think of something calming, I think of sitting in a park reading a book with talking and music in the background. I got all my sounds from the website freesound.org. I only used three sounds for this assignment. I wanted to get the outdoors feel of sitting in a park so I put a bird sound in. I wanted calming music in the distance so I added a saxophone. I think jazz music can be very calming when it is played slowing from a saxophone like in the recording I used. And finally, I added people talking because I wanted it to feel like others were around as well. It would be weird if there was no one talking in an open park on a nice, sunny day.
I hope this assignment showed a nice depiction of calmness.

Sounds Used:
Chirping Birds
Crowd Talking
Saxophone

The Audio Assignment “Emotions Through Sound” consists of conveying emotions only through sound effects or human sounds. I chose to attempt to convey the emotions of sadness and apprehension through sound effect clips. At first I was only going to focus on sadness, but as I started editing the audio clips, I realized that I could convey a more complicated emotion as well. The sounds of the slowly tolling bells and soft rain can make you visualize a gloomy, rainy day where a service is being held due to an unfortunate incident. The howling wind and claps of thunder would make someone feel apprehensive if they are venturing outdoors and they would quicken their pace to reach the safety of their home. I found sound clips of wind, bells, rain, and thunder at freesound.org and then imported the audio files into Audacity. While in Audacity, I shifted different sounds to different times, cut some audio out to shorten the entirety of the assignment, copied some sounds for layering, and altered the pitch and speed of some of the audio clips in order to attain the right conditions for a somber atmosphere. The edited file was then exported, uploaded to soundcloud, and embedded below.

Assignment Value: 3 stars

For my second audio assignment I chose to do the “Emotions Through Sound” assignment worth three points. I chose to make the emotion fear because I thought it would be the most fun emotion to do. I also felt that it was an emotion that could be done in many different ways. I decided to go a little science fictiony with it with the drone noises. I then added the classic little girl singing creepily to give it a classically spooky ambiance. I had a lot of fun listening to the different sounds and picking the ones I felt would best convey fear. I think the end result is pretty spooky. What do you think?

Here is a link to the original assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/emotions-through-sound/

I chose emotions through sound (3 stars) as one of my audio assignments because I think being able to portray emotion through only one sense can be very dramatic. Another reason I chose this assignment is because it requires the use of overlapping sounds or sound effects. I thought it would be a good challenge for me to try this, especially since I had some trouble not only finding good sounds to overlap for both my bumper and my sound effect story, but also making them sound nice when overlapped.

This track is supposed to portray an emotion. For this I chose to do sadness. Although it may seem like it’s two emotions, it is really just one. In the beginning the church bells and the woman sobbing are supposed to be sadness, and as the track goes on you hear a weird sounding voice calling out and then she screams. The woman calling out and the scream represent the memory the woman is having while she is crying in church at Jimmy’s funeral.

I chose the name Jimmy from one of the characters in the show American Horror Story who ends up disappearing for a short period of time.

In order to make this track, I used three sounds from the free-sounds webpage and I put them into GarageBand. I also recorded my own voice as the woman speaking in the memory. The sounds I found online can be seen below. After I created the sound on GarageBand, I uploaded it to iTunes and then soundcloud to post here!

church bells

woman crying

woman screaming