Tounge twisters can be so hard! I think there are certain ones that are definitely easier, but if you try to do all of them as fast as possible, you will get tripped up for sure. I wanted to make sure I did a few because they are all relatively short, so I picked 3 that I thought were well known and wrote them out in front of me. I played some fun background music I actually had on my phone (weird, I know). It was hilarious hearing myself back, especially during the mess ups. Audacity was my friend again here and helped capture my mess-ups so you all can laugh at them too!

For the Create a Place assignment, I chose to use my character Gallapher that I created.  This is her galloping off into the night!

Take a listen! Can you place this sound?

It is supposed to be what you can hear out of your bedroom window in a city. Car horns honking, people talking, an ambulance whirring by, and the rustle of people walking down the street.

This assignment was a little more difficult than I was expecting because the ambulance kept trying to over power all of the other sounds! It does for a bit, because realistically that does happen, but I wanted to be able to hear the other sounds along with it for the other bit of the clip! Hopefully that worked and you can picture what I tried to make you hear!

This was the Create a Place assignment, worth 4 stars.

I used freesound.org for the sound of this video.

When I read the assignment from the bank for this week, I noticed the one that said create a place using sound. Of course, the first place I thought of was the beach. It was so easy to make such a calming noise. AND I got 4 stars from it!

This is when I can add in my character as well. The character Olivia, LOVES to throw beach parties! The secret truth is she doesn’t do it for the party, she does it for the calm sounds. As expressed below:

For this assignment, I put together different sound effects to illustrate the sound of a busy city. I used New York City as inspiration for this assignment. I downloaded the sound effects and put them together on Audacity. It was not difficult to do and I enjoyed putting it together.

I was going to do a visual assignment, but the audio assignment Create A Place was just too interesting to NOT do.

I flipped through my copy of World War Z, trying to find the best setting to use (and there are so many to choose from!). At one point, I remembered the man blinded by a bomb in his youth who, as a man, fled from the apocalypse in Japanese civilization to be in the wild on a mountain.

Sensei Tomonaga Ijiro survived using all his senses but his sight, which I though lent very well to “Creating A Place” using only audio. He mentions hearing helicopters in the distance in the beginning, and later he comes in contact with a bear that serves not as a threat but as a warning. In the scene, Sensei Ijiro makes noises like weeping and shouting, but I decided to leave those parts out. The only part of him I left was footsteps at the very end.

I got all of my sounds from Freesound and used Audacity to edit it all together. It was fun playing with layering sounds, not just creating ambiance but also putting multiple sounds over top of each other to create one sound (for instance: I got audio of a person falling on a wooden floor and layered the sound of a dirt footstep over it to make it sound like the zombie fell onto the forest floor).

Lastly, if you are interested, here are the parts out of World War Z that I based my soundscape on:

I left civilization and trekked into the Hiddaka Mountains.
…

I had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of my country. I could
hear distant sounds, helicopters, fighter planes, the steady, high-altitude whine of
civilian jetliners.
…

It was a bear, one of the many large, brown higuma roaming the Hokkaido
wilderness. The higuma had originally migrated from the Kamchatka Peninsula and
bore the same ferocity and raw power of their Siberian cousins. This one was
enormous, I could tell by the pitch and resonance of his breathing. I judged him to be
no more than four or five meters from me. I rose slowly, and without fear. Next to
me lay my ikupasuy. It was the closest thing I had to a weapon, and, I suppose, if I
had thought to use it as such, it might have made a formidable defense.
…
I wept as I prepared myself for the blow.

It never came. The bear stopped panting then released a high, almost childlike
whimper. “What is wrong with you?” I actually said to a three-hundred-kilogram
carnivore. “Go on and finish me!” The bear continued to whine like a frightened dog,
then tore away from me with the speed of hunted prey. It was then that I heard the
moan. I spun, tried to focus my ears. From the height of his mouth, I could tell he
was taller than me. I heard one foot dragging across the soft, moist earth and air
bubbling from a gaping wound in its chest.
I could hear it reaching out to me, groaning and swiping at empty air. I managed
to dodge its clumsy attempt and snatched up my ikupasuy. I centered my attack on
the source of the creature’s moan. I struck quickly, and the crack vibrated up through
my arms. The creature fell back upon the earth as I released a triumphant shout of
“Ten Thousand Years!”

Create a Place

Listen to be transported into Hugh Howey’s world of Wool. These sounds emulate a multi-level society that survives underground in a giant vertical silo, all floors connected by one spiraling metal staircase.

Behind the Scenes

I knew the silo would be an interesting choice because of the metal, its vertical layout, and its spacious, round acoustics. With those acoustics in mind, I slapped plenty of reverb on every sound, and knowing the layout was vertical meant we could experience two or three floors perceived through audio. The sound of climbing the staircase as a sort of anchor because it is present throughout every floor.

Creating a convincing soundscape of this underground world means layering many tracks on top of each other and crafting each sound to seem as though it is truly resonating in the same place.

I grabbed sounds from freesound.org as well as from YouTube using the free 4K Video Downloader software. From there, I layered my different audio samples to try and tell the story of a person ascending/descending the staircase for a short time.

Fading audio in and out gradually gave us the illusion of movement throughout the silo. You can hear children, talking, another person passing on the steps, an intercom announcement (which I made following this tutorial, plus reverb), construction, and the constant moan of the metal staircase alongside our host’s footsteps.