Time for some radio fun! For this project, I’ve created a radio bumper for the DS106 Radio Show! Hope you guys enjoy!
My goal for this project was to create something with an 80s feel to it. I found audio that had an upbeat, techno feel to it. I figured this type of music would add a good mood to the show!
The details of the assignment can be found below:
Here is my DS106 Radio bumper! The original assignment can be found here.
I used just the ery beginning seconds of one of my favorite songs, Dark Love by Sam Evian. I wanted a bit of background noise as well as an interlude and outro- this was perfect for it! I just played this song briefly while speaking over it and used my iPhone voice memos app.
My abnormal radio bumper is based off an inside joke that my roommate Stella, and I have. Stella recently showed me a meme, where I laughed so hard that tears came out of my eyes! This meme has become a hilarious inside joke between us, that we reference ALL THE TIME! And so I decided to include our inside joke to make the bumper a little more interesting! 
I used audacity to edit this recording. And I played around with the distortion effect to give more emphasis and volume to specific parts of the bumper. I didn’t want my bumper to be boring and plain, so I decided to add my unusually creative touch to it!
WARNING: There is yelling. Therefore, don’t put up the volume very loud. Your ears might die… ENJOY! 
Like many of my classmates before this assignment I was not sure what a radio bumper was. After doing some research I found out that they are things I have heard all my life and just never realized it. This assignment was to create my very own radio bumper for DS 106 radio. I had fun with this assignment even though I thought it was going to be easy I was proved wrong. I never knew how hard it was to record myself and make it sound okay. I never have liked the sound of my voice in the past so I had to edit my bumper a little with audacity to make it where I could tolerate my voice recorded.
This inspiration comes from the different radio bumpers I heard on the radio for the stations I like to listen to. I find them catchy to where I will say them with the person saying the bumper. I hope mine is almost as good and catchy.
I am starting to enjoy audacity it is just very different from any software I have ever used before.
Here is my 12 second Radio Bump that I used with Audacity and Free Sounds to introduce my “radio station”
I really enjoyed creating my first bumper ever!! I used my voice memo on my phone to record myself, and uploaded it onto my computer. Then I imported that to Audacity and went to free sounds online and chose a guitar playing for background music. I found the hardest part of this assignment was what to say for my bumper. This is what I decided to say in my bumper: “Hello everyone! This is Mckayla Washington from DS106. I hope you are enjoying the music you are listening to today, and remember that you are listening to DS106radio!” I am excited to listen to DS106radio this week sometime between 8:30-9:30pm and hopefully I will hear my bumper! This is the link to the original assignment. This assignment was 4 stars.
I had no idea what a bumper was before starting this assignment. Little did I know, it was something I’ve been hearing since as long as I could remember. I don’t even know why I didn’t know that the name for those pauses within the radio stations are “radio bumpers”. I feel that’s super interesting to me!
I honestly didn’t know what to do for the two days I was thinking about this assignment; I didn’t know what to say to be more specific. Then I literally came up with the best idea ever: Disney channel was in my life since forever… their version of a “radio bumper” has been ingrained in my head. I felt that would be really funny to use, and it fit right over 10 seconds. It was perfect. I don’t get why I didn’t think of it sooner! It fit me and my personality the best.
This didn’t take me that long to do. I recorded the audio clip real quick (of course multiple times because the 1st to the 100th are never good enough), and then I uploaded the file to Soundcloud. Two steps, and I was done.
Here is my radio bumper! Enjoy!
Now that we have a #ds106 radio up and running creating a 15 to 30 second bumper for the station. What is a bumper? It is a short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(broadcasting)). So for ds106 it should certainly include “DS106 Radio” and some sort of message about the station with voice over music.
My first attempt mixing a voice recording with sound effects in Audacity.
This assingment was fun to make! I followed Kollin’s advice and used Bensound‘s Royalty Free Music for my background music. At the beginning of this assignemnt, I had a hard time figuring out how to change my audio files from M4A to MP3 so that I could edit the tracks in Audacity. I ended up finding several free audio converters on the internet. The other hard part of this assingment was deciding what to say for my bumper. In the end, I just invoked the theme of our class in a different way.
Below is the ds106 radio bumper that I created for the assignment Create A Ds106 Radio Bumper where you create a radio bumper for the ds106 radio. For this, I recorded myself saying the content for the radio bumper and then I added in some royalty-free background music that I got from Bensound. Then, I combined those two together using Audacity and tweaked some sound levels a little to get it just right. I did not think that this was too hard, and I enjoyed doing it. I hope you like my radio bumper, and listen to it below.
