This audio story contains various sound effects placed in the order of events of my life during January 2022. It was not an easy month for me. Honestly creating this audio story turned into more of a reflective assignment for me. I started off with shot glasses clinking before the ball drops on New Years’ Eve 2021. The champagne popping is reflective of 2022 beginning. I spent this time surrounded by my entire family and my closest friend. This was an awesome time… but little did we know that it would expose all of us to COVID-19 and the majority of my family would end up with the virus. The next sound is coughing and is representative of my family’s time with the virus. Next is an ambient car drive as I return to Mary Washington after isolating. Next is ambulance sounding, representative of a tragic loss in my close friend group. Tears come after because tragic events take a good amount of time to get over and I spent a lot of time in reflection. The music at the end was tagged as hopeful. After spending much time in sadness and reflection, I am hopeful that the rest of this year will be better.

I used Free Sound for the sound effects in this recording and Audacity to edit and put the sounds together. I used this assignment to continue to help my understanding of Audacity and to learn how to mix multiple sounds together.

This is my Sound Effects Story, Audio Assignments 2615. I used Audacity and found three sounds from freesound.org. They were of shuffling shoes, shoveling snow and a car crashing. With a lot of choices, I was thinking about what sounded best for sounds outside, in a snowy, icy cold environment. The plot of the story is a person goes out to shovel snow near a road and as they are shoveling they are interrupted by a car crash on the icy road. But then, they go back to shoveling because it’s just another crash among many on that road, that hour, that day. Then they’re done and they trudge off.

The difficulty was in figuring out Audacity and when I made a mistake, undoing my mistake (somehow I created loops) and starting over. I did learn to save my file as a project after I added the three sound files and before I began editing so I could take my time. this way I could always go back to the original if I had to start over. Luckily, I didn’t have to start over. I went back and forth between working on my project and listening to the Audicity tutorial link on Week 5 (although I am using a different version of Audacity). After I was finished, I again saved it as a project then finally exported it to my laptop then uploaded it to SoundCloud per the instructions. After that, I embedded it in this blog by pasting it in to the Code Editor. I think we’re good!

Bob Ross has his paints to create forest landscape, I tried sound.

“Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds. Another example (by a UMW student): http://ds106.us/wp-content/audio/audio_story.mp3“

Sound Effects Story Assinment

Well, it took me a second to think of a good story idea. Without dialogue or narration, the sounds would have to tell the story all by themselves. I thought about what sounds I wanted to play around with and settled on the woods. I have made soundscapes for woods before for other projects, and I really enjoyed it. 

So we had the setting: The Woodlands

Then I thought about what could happen in the woods. I mean, there is only one viable option. I chose monsters. Then I could also play around with monster sounds, which is a glorious rabbit hole of sound to fall into. 

Oft when I myself travel in the woods, there is always a moment when the surrounding wildlife recognize my presence and shut up. Only after a long stillness do they start up again. I wanted to try to build a very diverse sound world and then make it all get quiet as the monster approached, then loud again after the monster left. 

I used Freesound to get all of the sounds. I tried to use audacity to edit it, I really did, but when I tried to play the sounds to listen and edit them, it wouldn’t let me. It flashed all sorts of errors and systematic problems that I do not have the ability to fix. Once again, I find a way to dig under the wall of obstacles. Call me the King of the Shovels. So I fell back on what I know. There is actually a lot you can do with iMovie sound. Yes, it can be annoying, but its simplicity makes it very easy to use.

I didn’t even think to add a human character until the end.

Looking back, I probably should have chosen an easier story, but I had fun making it, even it is is only understandable after the explanation.

Just for fun, this is what it looked like when I finished.

Here is a sound effect story of waking up on a Saturday morning, getting ready, and running out the door to your car to head out for the day. The synth background music serves as the soundtrack and makes this feel like the opening of an 80’s teen movie.

For the assignment Sound Effects Story, I had to tell a story using only sound in less than 90 seconds. To create it I collected sound effects from SoundBible, Shockwave, BBC Sound Effects archive, and fesliyanstudios. I mixed and layered them using SoundTrap. I then uploaded it to SoundCloud. The picture I made on Canva.