Because we are doing the radio shows these next few weeks, I made another radio bumper to put into the show.
I got a lot of really good feedback on my first bumper, so I decided that I would kind of do the same thing again.
But, this time I wanted to change what I said. I determined that since this is for our radio show I would throw in an “advertisement” for my group’s radio show.
We have pretty much established our topic so I wanted to give a little preview of what we are going to talk about.
I also really liked the music that I added last time and felt the need to do it again but with a different piece of music. Can I just say that I love FreeSound? They have a lot of cool sounds if you take the time to search through them or use the right search terms.
Therefore, just as last time, I recorded my little bit and added the music into it. I made sure to fade it so that you could hear my voice and also cropped the audio to make it shorter since the original audio was about 1 minute.
The biggest issue again was trying to get the cropped audio to sound smooth but I did feel a little more confident about it this time.
Check it out and listen for it when we do the radio shows!
My very first Radio Bumper! It was so fun to make but I also hated replaying my own voice. There is something very cringy about that….though I think I became numb to it after a while haha. Anyways please enjoy my creation!!!
Radio Bumpers are the mini commercials that accompany radio shows. It reminds the listeners who they are turned into. There are all kinds of bumpers, but all are relatively short (only a few seconds).
Here’s my attempt at a radio bumper for the DS 106 Radio!
Creating a short 10-30 second radio bumper was a lot of fun. Using BBC Sounds and Freesound, I was able to get two great sound effects. One being a laser sound to start off the bumper and an explosion sound to close out the bumper. Here is my radio bumper, enjoy!
(Title a reference to a song… can you guess it? Enjoy a selfie of me in the Vocal Booth!)
Greetings! This is Sterling, and I am back with some more content. This week is audio-focused. We were tasked to create a ‘radio bumper’ between 15-30 seconds to go onto the DS106 radio. I will write about the experience below, as well as the tweet-along to the DS106 broadcast.
For my bumper, I was inspired by the radio stations at home that normally use a glitch-type effect in theirs. Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” has a nice, catchy intro and I used their more-percussive instrumental version to spice it up a little: tinyurl.com/vkqtd8f
I actually used Audacity a whole lot as a teen since I thought I wanted to do voice acting and music, so it was second nature to go through my amateur editing regimen. I reserved UMW’s Vocal Booth for a couple hours so I could have a good quality recording. It took a few tries to get the ‘right’ intonation (aka level of enthusiasm) without sounding too cheesy like they do on the radios. Then, I used the Noise Removal tool to get a profile of the white noise to remove it from the recording. After that, I used the Equalize tool to make the soundwave more level with a subtle Bass Boost. The Normalize tool came in handy to make it peak less and maintain a normal volume.
Following my clean-up of the vocals, I used a YouTube to MP3 converter website to download the instrumental. I then timed it the way I wanted before using the Equalizer again with the ‘Telephone’ and ‘Radio’ effects. Then, a Google Search suggested that I use the High Limit Filter to create the muffled ‘radio’ effect better; not 100% sure what this one does other than potentially expanding some of the lower frequencies, but it did the trick! Duplicating the word “to” in my audio clip helped make the ‘glitch’ effect. I thought Soundcloud would copyright my clip, but it looks like it passed.
I'll be in and out since I'm always working on a show at this time, but I'll contribute when I can! What a strong intro, this sounds like it came from a 70s film (if not a bit earlier). #ds106
Next, I wanted to discuss the DS106 radio tweet-along. Unfortunately, I was in-and-out and had to miss quite a bit of the last part. I’m participating in my school’s musical backstage and it’s a little hard to pay attention with one thing in one ear and something else in the other. We also performed during all of the times the radio was on this week – I should have emailed about it, but I didn’t notice that I would have this problem until Wednesday. However, I’ll share what I thought and observed about it!
I really enjoy the second-person perspective bit. Interesting stats about female protagonists in adventure. Good remarks on division "between safe and silent spaces of home and office." They didn't style Ursula K. Le Guin's name without 'K,' was it not used yet? #ds106
This is when the concept of escape was introduced. To be honest, I didn’t expect this to be so much like a documentary (though I suppose it is). However, it was a good preface to the tale of the Vanishing Lady. It reminded me of an English paper in that regard.
"Theatre of a Poisoned World" – Toxicity in wilderness spaces, but also in home. It hangs in natural and manmade. Certainly ties in with the consumerism of the time. Does 'urban legend' imply that these events originate from tragedies exclusive to man? #ds106
Here are more ramblings; I wish I could’ve caught all of the context since this post is a bit disjointed. Though I like how the story explained these concepts early on, planting the seeds of observation in mind so that the listener can potentially figure out a mystery.
Acting out Cynthia's explanations reminds me of how folk spoke in Alfred Hitchcock movies. Slight Blanche duBois vibes? And wow that narrator's French pronunciation… yikes. #ds106
Just the general play on innocence reminded me of A Streetcar Named Desire and how they spoke in the Marlon Brando movie. And, of course, Hitchcock movies. I’m not the greatest at French, though I’ve been taking classes for 8 years and it was quite a blatant mispronunciation (which is OK).
Female traveler… like Marion Crane from Psycho? That winding down skewed-record music was very ominous, and also gives me Hitchcock vibes. #ds106
Seems to be quite a bit of 'spoken decor,' which is often used in Shakespeare when actors describe a setting without seeing a physical space. Also either that's real static, or it is a pretty freakin' awesome sound effect. #ds106
If their goal is to make me paranoid, I can tell you that they aren't failing with all that talk about surveillance cameras and the like. How applicable to modern society and the privacy debate! #ds106
That’s where I had to stop because the show was wrapping up, but it was really neat to be able to visualize what was being spoken about. I liked how it went from explanation to story, though it felt like the story took a while to actually begin. This method of storytelling was also nice because I could do things with my hands while I listened. I’ve never really tried audiobooks, but I certainly understand the appeal now. Until next time!
It’s my first go at making a radio bumper, and I used Logic and its built-in software instruments, together with the default text-to-speech voice on my Mac (“Daniel”). Despite its very short length, I found it quite difficult to produce something with the right balance, focus and clarity. It is my first try anyhow, and I hope to improve my skills in future, so it’s good practice and I’m learning a lot!
In the meantime, I’ve been learning a little more about ethnography as part of the EDC course. Another thing that inspired me to take part in the radio bumper assignment during my micro-ethnographic study of ds106 was this podcast with anthropologist Tim Ingold. As he puts it:
‘With anthropology, the university in which we study is the world itself….in anthropology, we actually treat the world as a great big university. We don’t make studies of people, we study with them and learn from them.’
I’m certainly learning a lot from taking part in ds106, and from your assignments, and am looking forward to learning more as I explore and study with you further!
This week one of our assignments was to create a radio bumper introducing our local DS 106 radio show. This assignment was very challenging to be at first because I know very little about audio software and editing. I first watched a few videos on how to use Audacity which I will link below and went from there. I downloaded a Radio Tuning sound from http://soundbible.com/tags-radio.html to create a tuning radio effect at the beginning of my audio. After this I added in some elevator music and it was smooth sailing from there! I simply dropped my file onto Soundcloud and it almost was published instantly. Here’s the finished project, hope you enjoy!!
Here are a few videos that may help you use Audacity:
thats a really mean thing to say and i don’t mean it in regards to anyone including myself its just the most clever title i can currently think of for my ds106 RADIO BUMPER!
This was really cute! a nice one take shot to get me into the groove of using audacity. Also helps that I proceeded to listen to the ds106 radio show that night, so I heard a couple of them in action; which was super funky fun! I had a really good time using my voice to its fullest extent with this assignment; because the lack of visual stimuli means I need and want to compensate with Super Interesting Voice Tricks!
This week, I decided to start off with doing the radio bumper so I would have the opportunity to listen to it this week. I work during two of the radio show broadcasts so I am hoping to catch the one on Monday night.
Having no experience with audio editing, I watched a few clips online about how to use Audacity and they were really helpful.
I didn’t want just my voice for the bumper, so I wanted to add some background music to it. I went to the recommended Free Sounds and found this super cool techno 80’s music,
I was able to use the volume and fade in/out tool to edit the music to be loud at first, below my voice in the middle, and loud again at the end.
One of the biggest struggles of this assignment was not only trying to come up with what to say, but editing the parts of the music that I wanted to hear so that it would flow well. I probably spent about 2 hours on it.
Although learning this new software can be difficult, I’ve actually had a good time using it. I really like editing music and seeing what I can do with it. I almost wish I would have discovered this when I was younger so I could get the right software and make a habit of it. Life hasn’t been the same since I stopped playing my instrument, and I think editing like this would be a good alternative. Plus, there’s so many cool things you can do.
For this assignment I created a bumper for my upcoming radio show. I used GarageBand and uploaded it on my SoundCloud. I used sound I downloaded from Free Sounds. I used the robot voice to overlap a normal recording to create the sound and then duplicated it a few seconds later.
