Ever since I started watching The Wire, I started loving that TV Show. Although in the beginning of this week when I heard about the ds106 radio show bumpers, I was interested. Hearing the first one over the radio, I was fascinated by it. I knew I wanted to start making one. This week I made two! I decided to do the “Create A ds106 Radio Bumper”. All I did was open Audacity then imported an MP3 file of The Wire Season 2 Episode 1 and 3. I trimmed the scenes that I wanted and made it like this.

For the first bumper, I followed a youtube video to do this but it wasn’t what I thought it would be. At least, it sounds cool. The music I’ve had it for a while so all I did was importing it to Audacity.

The second one, all I did was record my voice, change the pitch and go to percent change which if you put “15” or more, you’ll sound like a chipmunk. So that’s how I basically did it.

Hope you guys enjoyed these ds106 radio bumpers!

Very short bumper created for the audio assignment, “Create a DS106 Radio Bumper.” I first found the kind of sound I wanted on SoundCloud by searching for Creative Commons EDM mixes and then clicking around in songs to find their buildups. There’s ALWAYS buildups in EDM. Then I headed over to Freesound and search for sounds that kind of sounded like wires running electricity or something of that nature since this class is also known as Wire106. I finally found one that the scratchy kind of hum sound I was envisioning. Lastly, I needed someone to say “DS106 Radio.” I knew I definitely did not want to record myself talking, so I searched for free online text to speech computer generated voices that also allowed me to download the audio. I came across YAKiToMe! and used the “Audrey” voice to say “DS1O6 Radio.”

After I got these three bits downloaded, I imported them into Audacity. I found the particular buildup in the EMD mix I wanted and trimmed down the audio to just the buildup. I then faded in and faded out the EDM buildup. Next, I faded in and out the electricity sound. After that, I broke up the voice audio so I could spread out the “D,” “S,” “106,” “Radio,” and I added the reverb effect to all of the voice part. I placed the different voice parts to where I thought they might work best, and then  lastly, I sped up the voice part just a tad.

Credits for the sounds used:
1. COMMERCIAL EDM MIX JAN 6TH 2014 by djsn1 on SoundCloud

2. Electricity.wav by da_maestro on Freesound.org

3. Audrey voice from YAKiToMe!

Radio Logo:
I used Pixlr to redesign of the DS106 logo.

Create Your Radio Bumper

I decided to start out with a gibberish sounding noise. I then added some static to start the sound. Next comes the two noises resembling the “d” and “s” in ds106. Then there is a computer voice saying “one” followed by the sound “oh yeah.”
I related this sound with my experiences in the class so far. When I first read the weekly assignments, I feel like it is all gibberish. Then I pause and let the static filter out. I come up with some good ideas that are unique. Finally, I say “oh yeah” because I’ve finished all of my work.

Let me know what you think!

Here are the links from freesound I used:

http://www.freesound.org/people/thenudo/sounds/146763/

http://www.freesound.org/people/mattwasser/sounds/58931/

http://www.freesound.org/people/sangtao/sounds/191465/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Aiwha/sounds/196106/

http://www.freesound.org/people/blue2107/sounds/172086/

http://www.freesound.org/people/[email protected]/sounds/169198/

For my ds106 radio bumper, I went with a techno feel. I used this sound from freesound.org  and a voice changing app on my phone to record the robot sounding “ds106 radio” and then used Audacity to put them together. I was really struggling with Audacity last night, so I hope that whatever I come up with for the other audio assignments will be an improvement on this.

Since this week seems to be focused on audio projects, I decided to work on a radio bumper for our own ds106 radio station! I’m excited to see how the station works out when it comes to live tweeting the episodes. It was quite easy to make, I used a text to speech program with a bullhorn effect (the voice is Bridget) and aligned it with the music track with Audacity. I’ve had experience with the program before with my audio introduction, so I’m quite happy to get a chance to use it again! as for the choice of The Wire theme, well, it’s pretty obvious isn’t it? Plus the season one version so far is my favorite.

Difficulty: 1.5 Stars