Spooky Dialogue

This was an Audio Assignment and it was worth 3 and 1/2 stars. This assignment was to make a spooky dialogue using your voice and other sounds. Since this week we had to use at least 5 stars worth of assignments on our host character I thought I would also use my character in this one. The dialogue is of her talking to someone who is about to die. You never hear the other person it is only her and that is for the effect that it is their last few breaths and are speechless in her presence. I started out with making her dialogue alone. I even used a creepy laugh to get a chill in there for the listener. I then had put in another voice and it was me repeating the words death, die, the sound shush and goodbye. I put that audio as an underlining backdrop of the audio. I then put lightning in the beginning of the audio because that is her signature entrance. I decided to put more sounds of winds and howling ghosts that fade out after the dialogue as it the end of the mystery person life. Overall I believe I had at least 4 different audio pieces and then some duplicated to add of through the audio. There was many trials and errors with this one with the level of sound of audio that I wanted to come out so one didn’t overpower the other. Overall I think that it had a spooky factor and that it also did justice to my host character. If I could have done anything to improve this maybe change the pitch of the host character to a little bit higher. I hope you enjoy it! The sound effects again came from freesound.org.

This week we were to create audio assignments that might work well with our radio show due to air next week.  For one of my projects I chose this one entitled Spooky Dialogue and created a Spooky Commercial to air on the radio show.  The Commercial is coming from my host character Esmerelda a fortune teller who uses a crystal ball to tell you things you seek to discover.

To create the audio I used Audacity and recorded my advertisement and slowed down the speed by 10%.  Then I went to freesound.org and found a scary audio by searching on graveyard sounds.  This one was perfect background music for a commercial and was long enough for what I needed.  I truly appreciate those people who create this stuff and share it.  I added the music track in Audacity and then saved as a MP3 document which I uploaded to Soundcloud.com for am image I used the radio show poster featuring Esmerelda that I blogged to you yesterday.  I have shared this with my teammate that will be putting together our radio show.  Thanks HeadReaper!

I chose to do the Spooky Dialogue audio assignment in the assignment bank, because I figured it would allow me a chance to really play around with the different things I can do in Audacity, and I’m attracted to spooky and unsettling things. Basically, for this assignment, we have to make and edit a recording so that it sounds scary or “otherworldly”.

I knew that I wanted to focus on something that had to do with anxiety, existence, feelings of unreality, etc. because those are things that I find the most horrifying. As far as what I came up with, I am still uncertain about some things, although I wasn’t able to figure out exactly what I wanted everything to sound like. But I am happy about the background noises, with came out far better than I could have expected.

For the process:

I began by downloading Audacity, a program I have used and played around with in the past. Then I just messed around with it, recording the main dialogue until it was about how I wanted it, editing it in certain places (usually just pitch changes, a couple speed/tempo changes, and echos/reverbs), and then worked on the background sounds. For a couple of them, I found the “wahwah” effect to be fascinating, and 2 tracks are reversed because there’s really nothing creepier than people talking backwards.

For the strange, alien spaceship noise in the background, I ran my finger over the microphone on my headphones, and then used the “noise reduction” effect and was just lucky that it turned out sounding really cool. Like…really, I didn’t expect it to sound like that, I was initially planning on making regular old static, but it turned out super cool, so I’d suggest playing around with that.

Overall, could I have done more to this? Probably. Could I have made it creepier? Also probably. But this assignment was enjoyable, and allowed for me to learn more about Audacity than I’ve had to learn for assignments in the past.