Original DS106 Assignment: Have A Phone Conversation With Yourself (5 stars)

A start up fitness company is always the hardest to get people to join because people have loyalties to. In answering all the calls for my new business, Pilates Room, I want to make sure the person interested needs are met and have all their questions answered. Below is a sample call between a customer service representative and a potential member.

Step 1: Open Audacity. Click on the red “Record” button and speak into for the audio you want to record. Since there is going to be two “people” speaking you need to do two different audio recordings to be able to alter them separately.

Step 2: Go to freesound.org and find an audio that would add the effect you would like for the recording and download it to your computer. I added the phone ringing and some nice relaxing music you’d expect to hear playing in a pilates room.

Step 3: Go back to Audacity and Follow File > Import > Audio, to upload the audio you found on freesound.

Step 4: Be mindful of where the audios are. When you import and audio, it automatically adds it to the beginning of the track. With this being a phone call, all the bells and whistles don’t need to be going off at the same time. Click the gray bar at the top of each audio to make edits to them. This is best done when no recording is going on because it gives you more access to effects.

Step 5: Save! Or Export. I was trying to do the usual Save As to name and save the file, but it gave me a warning that it needs to be “Exported” to be able to be used outside of Audacity.

this was delightful! I had a lot of fun with this assignment, of which the goal was to record a phone conversation with myself, but to try and make it seem like its two completely different people! Here’s the final product!

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, but also in the spirit of you don’t need a significant other to be valuable and important, I decided to focus my conversation on plans between friends for a Valentines lady hangout sesh! I start it off with a little bit of a monologue from the more valley girl type character, and then it devolves into planning and goodbyes.

Although I might be taking the listener out of the setting with my use of the word galentines, I tied this assignment to the pop culture theme by looking up the most popular slang of the 80s and absolutely INFILTRATING my dialogue with it. Additionally, the bagel bites and crystal light bit at the end is based in research on popular 80s snack foods! lots of cereal on the list, which seems Kind Of Odd. Nevertheless! The next step in my process was the purloin the vocal booth to record everything. Regarding the order of recording, I decided to record each gal seperately so that they would be on two different tracks, thus making it easier (I think) to maneuver their parts around and make it seem more conversational. Once everything was recorded, I went into audacity and first changed the pitch of each part so that it sounded more like two different people. Then I moved everything around, added and removed silences to make it sound more natural and gave it another listen through. I decided after that, that the valley girl voice (the second one to speak) would be better suited to a faster speaking voice. So I sped up her voice by like 10% and then had to readjust everything to fit again :(. It was worth it tho! The final step was to add 20 seconds of telephone ringing to the beginning in order to establish that its a phone call, which I got from- you guessed it- freesound.org. I am really happy with how this worked out and I think its Hilarious, especially with the Very Stereotyped 80s and valley girl slang.

This was just such a cool assignment; I’m quite happy with the final product. I really enjoyed just playing around with audio and sounds. Also slang has always been something I’m super interested in, especially and specifically current slang, but seeing the history and old slang terms was super cool too! I think I certainly went a little bit heavy on the slang, but honestly that amount kinda tracks with how much current slang I feel like I use in (non-professional & non-academic) speech, so mayhaps not!

gotta motor! -liz

“So far this semester, he has been absent 9 times. 9 times? 9 TIMES…”

For my telephone conversation assignment, I decided to recreate one of my favorite scenes from popular 1980’s movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off! I had to watch this scene so many times to recreate it that this scene is stuck playing in my head! I recorded myself talking for Ed Rooney and Katie Bueller, and I played with the sound effects to differentiate between the two characters! I also emphasized the “9 times” part of the scene by slowing down the words and making them louder than the rest. I hope my recreation grants you a wave of nostalgia from this classic 80’s movie!

DO NOT RELEASE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE

The following is a classified recording of an phone conversation intercepted from New Temp City, between the agent Wisteria and an unknown civilian known as “Ryan”. Wisteria’s voice is masked in the recording, so that her true tone of voice is left unknown. The meaning for the call and the result of the mission assigned here is unknown to the SDONE at this time.

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Have A Phone Conversation With Yourself

Using Audacity or another audio editing software, record yourself holding down both sides of a conversation. Using the pitch changer and/or other effects, change your voice so it sounds like two different people are talking.

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BEHIND THE SCENES

I chose this particular assignment from the assignment bank because I saw it as a great oppertunity to explore audio storytelling, audio effects, and include my character in the assignment! I had some previous experience with audio experimentation from a class I took on audio editing last semester, so it was nice to both relearn and utilize those skills for this project!

This was a great oppertunity to not only include my character, but get a sense of her character and tone of voice when talking to others.

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MAKING OF THE ASSIGNMENT

— Opened up my audio program (Audacity)

— Wrote out a mock transcript as to how I wanted the conversation to go.

— Recorded my lines first, then recorded Wisteria’s in a deeper tone of voice.

— Applied a series of HPFs, LPFs and Amplifiers in order to achieve “phone quality” sound.

— Looked up various phone sound effects and added them to the piece (ringing, end tone, pick up sound)

— Applied a pitch filter on Wisteria’s voice in order to mask it.

— Saved as a WAV, then uploaded to Soundcloud.

That’s really all there was to it! It was a fun, easy assignment that I wouldn’t have qualms with doing again. Thank you for the opportunity!

So this was the first assignment that I completed using Audacity, and while it’s only a couple seconds long…wow Audacity is daunting.

I got the idea for the assignment here, where you have to have a phone conversation with yourself. I thought this would be easy, but I spent well over an hour with it…I guess audio is just not my thing, but im hoping I can change that throughout this week!

I first had to figure out how to manipulate the voices. I couldn’t figure out how to not give the higher pitched voice a non-echoey presence….that was so frustrating. The deeper voice was easier, and I laughed a couple times playing back the voice. That part wasn’t too terrible sounding, in my opinion.

Next, I had to go find a sound bit to put at the end like one of the characters was hanging up the phone. I probably didn’t have to do this part, but I invested a lot of time halfway through so I thought, might as well keep going. I finally got it to work after a while.

So here it is! A prank call from myself to myself. I think of this as the classic prank call script, so enjoy.

-Caty

To incorporate my character into an assignment this week, I chose to have a phone conversation (5 stars). I decided to have an animal call Kate (my character) for help. I wrote the script and then recorded myself speaking it. I then started to play with the effects and it started to sound the chipmunks. I decided to have a chipmunk call. I went through and added the chipmunk voice and added the phone ringing and hanging up from freesound.

I liked being able to incorporate my character into this assignment. This was one of my first times using Audacity, so it took me awhile to learn, but I think I am getting used to it.

Until next time,

Emily

In this episode of “The Phone is Ringing!” we hear the conversation between Dr. Peters and his patient’s mother. They discuss the reason he is calling his patient and the mother informs the doctor she and her daughter will be right in to see him.

To create this assignment, I used a ringing phone sound effect and recorded my voice two different ways which I put all together on Audacity. This is what I created.

https://soundcloud.com/user-294611243/phone-call

So, my daughter pointed out to me as I recorded this audio that it will be interpreted as racist or discriminatory or anti-something.

My answer to that is that this is nonfiction.

This is a phone conversation I had sometime back in 1997 or ’98. I wrote the dialogue as true to my memory as possible. The greatest difference is that the caller was female, which I couldn’t re-create in Audacity (also, my phone number was different then, but I don’t remember it).

I was a young Marine at the time. I later learned that the person who wrote the check was another Marine who also lived on Quantico but belonged to another unit. He picked my number at random, then started bouncing checks all over the local area, writing my phone number on the checks. When the police did contact me, we straightened everything out and I encouraged them to prosecute him to the fullest extent because, well, screw that guy.

So, in answer to my daughter’s accusation, how is one supposed to portray an event if one of the parties uses broken English? Am I supposed to change what they actually said? Am I supposed to omit information or not talk about it because one party was of a different ethnicity? I’m sorry, but the first option does not represent reality and the second is censorship. If anyone is offended by this post, I re-created this phone call to the best of my ability to be a true and accurate representation of an actual event. That’s not racist.

To create this audio file, I started by writing the full conversation out in MS Word. I recorded it with an audio recorder and imported it into Audacity. I copied each section of the ‘caller’s’ voice and pasted each into place on a second track, generating silence over them in the first track. I also generated a tone to ‘bleep’ out my phone number.

Highlighting the entire second track, I adjusted the pitch and tone of the voice, increasing the speed slightly and raising the pitch.  I downloaded sound effects for a ringtone and dial tone, placing them at the beginning and end.

Then, I exported the audio as an mp3.

Five stars of additional design work

Have A Phone Conversation With Yourself (5 Stars):

Phones give us the ability to converse with anyone we want to, no matter where they are. For this assignment, I was required to record audio of myself holding down both sides of a conversation. I used a voice pitcher to make it sound like two different people are talking to each other.

You can find the audio clip down below or click here to be redirected to my SoundCloud.

The Process

I am not going to lie, this assignment, along with others, drained me. It took lots of dedicated and precise work to make it sound somewhat believable. I used Audacity to create the entire audio clip of me having the conversation with myself.

1. I started by writing a script of what I was going to say in the audio piece. This didn’t take too long since I have a lot of knowledge of what gets said during most phone conversations. I wrote the script in Microsoft Word to speed up the editing and revision process.
2. After completing the script, I opened up audacity and started to record my conversation. This did take a few retries because I kept messing up.
3. Then, after completing the audio piece, I started editing the “second person’s” audio. I did this by using the “change pitch” feature in the effects tab on the top menu for audacity. I changed the pitch from F to D#/Eb. The percent change was the most important tool because that decides how much you want to change the pitch. I chose to go with -11 percent because it made my voice deeper, but not too deep to be unbelievable.
4. After changing the “second person” audio bit, I went on to listen back to the entire audio clip and check for any mistakes. After seeing that the audio piece sounded nice and clear, I exported the audio file to an MP3 file on to my computer. Finally, I uploaded it to my SoundCloud.