AudioAssignments36 – Assignment Bank

Bumpin’

View Assignment Details

Now that we have a #ds106 radio up and running, I have an assignment to create a 15-30 second radio bumper.

This was a fun audio assignment, allowing to play with Audacity again. I first wrote down my script for what I would say exactly. After deciding on “You’re listening to DS106 radio! Stay tuned for more quality content.” I went to my itunes library and listened to a bunch of songs to try and get an appropriate back ground song/sound. I decided on I. Crwal by Childish Gambino, however, I used the instrumental of it. download link is here.

Once that was decided, I opened up Audacity and voice recorded my script in two parts on my iMac mic. I did add some cool echo effects under the effect tab. I then imported the downloaded instrumental, cropped it, and adjusted the timing with the voice recording. Sounds easy, but it took some time.

2.5 STARS

View Assignment Details

Welcome to ds106radio

View Assignment Details

Here’s my ds106radio bumper! This assignment took me a pretty long time to complete. First, I had to find the perfect song that conveyed the noir feeling I wanted. I knew I wanted to do something with a jazzy feel to it, so I looked at some of my favorite jazz musicians. I decided on this track from Wynton Marsalis, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” I liked the sound of this because it was simple, yet the music is really beautiful. It also crescendos in a way that allowed me to play with different areas where I could insert my voice.

After clipping the song and recording my separate audio, I had trouble figuring out how to merge the tracks into one. Luckily, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I was able to turn to my trusty Audacity online manual to find out how to do just that. Here I found out a lot of cool tips on ways to play with the two tracks and make them blend more cleanly. I specifically liked the envelope tool, which allowed me to fade out the music around my audio in order to amplify it and make a clear sound.

Still, after all the fun tricks I learned in this manual, I still couldn’t figure out how to merge the two tracks into one. Then I realized that editing the two pieces of audio in a single Audacity file was how I was merging them. Something so simple that I made so confusing in my head. Well, at least I learned something new.

I like the finished product of my radio bumper. It sounds very old school to me, and the visual I see with it is an emcee at a smoky nightclub walking up to the microphone, announce the next act, and then falling back into the shadows. I think it feels pretty noir, but what do others think?

View Assignment Details

Finally, a bumper!

View Assignment Details

Here is my radio bumper! After hours of trying to figure out how to use and play with Audacity I created this! The background music is Jorge Quintero’s 300 Violin Orchestra which I thought fit noir pretty well because it builds up and creates a suspenseful mood. I was able to record my own voice and then manipulate it to sound like a voice that was actually from a radio so I thought that was pretty cool. Looking up how to do that was actually one of the first things I looked for a tutorial for! It’s nothing too drastic, but I think I did an alright job considering this is my first time working with editing and playing with audio. I think this will definitely be useful because I like to sing and record myself doing so, so I think this knowledge will help me be able to edit my recordings so they can sound a little better!

This was a frustrating assignment because I couldn’t figure out how to save my file as an MP3 even after downloading the LAME encoder so I had to watch and read many tutorials before I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. Turned out, I was just trying to go too fast through the saving process and didn’t fill out enough information for the metadata which is why it wouldn’t save.

I decided to get this assignment out of the way early because I knew I would need a while to figure out how to do everything since (like I said before) this is my first experience manipulating audio. Now that it’s over I think I’ll be able to maneuver my way through the rest of the assignments this week with a bit more ease!

View Assignment Details

The Freddy Affair, Episode 1

View Assignment Details

“The Freddy Affair,” by Andrew Forgrave, on Flickr

Paul Bond (@phb256, on Twitter) posted a request earlier today for some #noir106 bumpers for ds106radio. After a bit of messing around, I decided that this particular project needed a new voice, and so the narration was re-recorded (and slightly modified). We always tend to be hyper-critical of our own recorded voices when we hear them. Anyway, I’m pleased with the result.

The Audio

The text evolved in conjunction with successive listens-and-speaks as I tried to match the narrative flow with the phrasing in the music. After a couple of recording efforts using the wonderful, free, open source, cross-platform Audacity, I sourced a bit of ambient street sound from freesound.org to add at the beginning and the ending.

Street noise: “street short” by hoptenon on freesound.org (CC0 1.0)
Music track: “Pink Fish Signs V2″ by GeeNerve from the 2004 recording Suspense Dance Delights (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Given that the backing music track is 0:57 in length, I was initially going for a 1-minute bumper. But in the final analysis, I decided that this might instead be better positioned as the initial episode of some kind of #noir106 radio short.

The Image

As I was pondering what to use for a graphic to accompany the audio track on Soundcloud, I decided to make use of a screen capture I had already collected. The image is from the opening credits of Alan Parker‘s 1987 film “Angel Heart,” starring Mickey Rourke as a down on his luck P.I. in post-WWII New York/New Orleans. (I’ll save my commentary on the film — and my GIFs — for another post.)

Opening Credit Scene from Angel Heart (1987) film by Alan Parker

I cropped the image to provide a 1:1 square album cover using the most interesting part, and then tried out a number of fonts found on fontspace.com.

I poked around with several before settling on DK P.I. which has a grunge-typewriter look — the kind you get from the P.I.’s busted-up typewriter after it’s been knocked off the desk and shot, four times too many.

You can see a number of different looks below that I tried before settling on the chosen font.

“The Freddy Affair font experiments,” animated GIF by @aforgrave

You can also see that I decided to change the title from “The Freddy Files” to “The Freddy Affair” during the album cover preparation.

The Process

In this post I’ve tried to model linking, embedding, attribution, and the process of sourcing and documenting visual, audio and font resources. I didn’t go into the details of using Audacity or Photoshop, but there is time enough for each of those in the coming weeks — by me or by others in the community.

Although this is perhaps a bit long for a #ds106radio bumper, it probably sells the #noir106 experience and invites the listener to tune in to #ds106radio in coming days — so I’ve also tagged it for Audio Assignment 36: Create a DS106Radio Bumper

Let me know if I’ve missed something!

View Assignment Details

Create a ds106 Radio Bumper

View Assignment Details

Radio bumpers are fun bits of audio to create, so this ds106 Audio Assignment was pretty painless to make. The main creative decision I took was to avoid using music and use sound effects in a musical way and to play on the idea of radio waves, interference, low hum and sirens. The speech files were all downloaded from an online dictionary (‘d’, ‘s’, ‘1’ etc). All the files were edited in Audacity with some processing such as fades and echo and effects such as white noise ‘clicks’. The following Creative Commons sounds were used from Freesound:

‘bass1.wav’ by ReadeOnly

‘Spooky whistle G#4.wav’ by Jovica

‘Air raid siren_long’ by vibekefalden

View Assignment Details

There goes the last DJ

View Assignment Details

I agreed to give a mini-workshop on podcasting on Wednesday, to force myself to learn more about Audacity. Creating a bumper for DS106 Radio seemed like a good way to get started, and it’s a manageable amount of work for a 20-minute demonstration.

Here’s the thing, followed by how I made it:

First, I wanted to know what I’d be saying. The old Outer Limits opening came to mind – “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical.” That speaks a little to the “own your tools” ethos of DS106.

But if “we” control it, that suggests that “you” (the listener) doesn’t. And that doesn’t sound very DS106 at all. So I rewrote it, for a participatory audio culture, to be “Radio DS106 – You control the gain; you control the Auto-Tune.”

Then I went hunting for an audio track to mix in. A search for “sci-fi” on CCMixter turned up a track called “Space Station Melody” by a member called Gurdonark. (For a 15-second bump on a non-profit radio station, you could probably make a fair use argument for whatever you wanted to sample… but it’s also a chance for me to model searching for Creative Commons-licensed material for my faculty.)

It’s kind of funny, come to think of it… the futuristic pinging of Space Station Melody is more reminiscent of the pizzicato opening of The Twilight Zone than the dramatic strings and horns of The Outer Limits.

Anyway, I recorded into Audacity, imported the Space Station Melody MP3, and arranged the voice track to the point in the music where I wanted it to start. I brought the volume of the music down a hair while I was talking with the Envelope tool, and used the Fade Out filter to get out. (And then trimmed off the end of the music.)

I owe a link of thanks to Nicky Memita for her post on this assignment, which was quite useful as I navigated Audacity’s imposing list of filters and effects.

View Assignment Details

DS106 Radio Bumper: “Where Were You When..?”

View Assignment Details

For the DS106 radio show, each group member was tasked with creating their own radio bumper. For my submission, I wanted to try my best to capture the essence of what I intended the show to be: a retelling of important historical events from one’s own perspective. The first two clips feature my voice saying “DS106 Radio” followed by the title of the show “Where Were You When..?”. To start, I layered the clips with the Hard Limiter effect to decrease the sound of my voice, followed by the Amplify effect to increase it. I also utilized the Wahwah (yes, Wahwah) effect to add a “Wahwah” (go figure) sound to the recording. The final effect I used on my voice was the Reverb effect. I was not really sure how to use this effect, so I simply played with the settings until I was relatively happy with the result.

After I finished editing my voice, I had to decide on the body of the bumper. I picked three sound clips: the sound of a space shuttle launch, military planes flying, and fireworks. The space race, and space travel in general were huge events in history which are referenced by the first clip. It is also the topic of my segment of the show! The second clip is meant to represent the various wars throughout modern history, which have had some effect on nearly every person in existence. The third sound, fireworks, could represent many things, such as celebrations of memorable events.

With all the sounds in place, I went ahead and repeated the “DS106 Radio” clip at the end of the bumper. Even though the bumper was complete, it still felt like something was missing so I picked a blues loop and overlayed it over the entire bumper.

View Assignment Details

Overcoming Audio Editing Fears

View Assignment Details

Building my Audacity Friendship

For the audio assignment Create a DS106 Radio Bumper (1.5 stars) I used Audacity to upload, mix, and edit several recorded clips. To begin this assignment, I asked two of my roommates to allow me to record them saying “DS106″. On Audacity I recorded myself saying “You’re listening to…” and “DS106 radio” while also pulling a clip of the theme from The Wire, Season 2 called “Way Down in the Hole”. Using the YouTube tutorial posted below, I played with each sound clip and added the following effects:

Amplify

High Pass Filter

Fade Out

Normalize

Reverb

Change Tempo

After giving each of the clips a radio sound effect, I positioned each using the slider tool so that the timing was just right. I’m very happy with the results of my DS106 radio bumper and am so excited to add it to our radio project! Take a listen…

View Assignment Details

DS 106 Radio

View Assignment Details

I tried to keep the bumper relevant to The Wire. I found this assignment to be one of the easier ones so far!

Process

I went on YouTube to find the theme song of The Wire.
Then I went to convert the song to an MP3 so it could be uploaded to Audacity.
Then I used an automated dictionary to get the DS 106 Radio in.
I then cut down the song to the very beginning and moved the DS 106 Radio to the middle.

View Assignment Details

Trying to Tune Into DS106 Radio

View Assignment Details

One audio assignment I completed this week was Create A DS106 Radio Bumper. I decided to make it related to The Wire so I could possibly use it for my radio show. Using audacity I recorded my self saying DS106. I then used the effect “paulstretch” to have it said a little slower. I also lowered the pitch to make it sound very low. There is no reason for this I just thought it sounded cool. I pulled a sound effect off of Youtube for the beginning of the bumper. I wanted it to sound like you were trying to turn the knob to tune in to the right station. Now with digital receivers we do not have this issue but I remember when I was younger trying to get that exact spot where you didn’t hear any fuzzy noise. Thanks to soundclouds copyright laws I was unable to upload it to soundcloud so I am uploading it directly here. The assignment did not take too long. I am definitely getting better at audacity so that helps cut back on the time for editing.

1.5 Stars