What’s it like to wake up in the morning? Well in this story, you hear some yawning, some rustling to get out of bed, and then some walking to the bathroom. There you hear the morning pee, the toilet flushing and hand washing/drying. Next, you hear teeth brushing. That’s how my morning always starts. Below [...]
My group for the Sound Effects Story consisted of myself, Maura Monahan, and Nick Antonini. Since the morning routine cliché was shot down by Jim Groom, we had to create our entire story in twenty minutes. Like the rest of the class, our minds went straight towards tragic accidents. We decided to start by laying down the scene for our story. The birds are chirping and the weather was nice enough that our main character decided to take a walk down the street. We used footsteps and whistling to portray the man’s enjoyment of the nice day and the sounds of traffic so you would know he was near a roadway. We let this take up a decent amount of time to set the mood and add suspense. Then all of a sudden out of nowhere the man screams (for this we used the famous Wilhelm scream). Then we inserted the common sounds of a car accident: wheels screeching, vehicle parts flying, ect. After a short silence you begin to hear the ambulance approaching in the distance. We used freesound.org for all of our sound effects. Our Sound Effect Story can be found here:
http://soundcloud.com/nick-antonini/ohh-no-1
For this story, I used freesound.org and garage band. I am still getting used to garageband, but it’s going a little smoother. I love the audio assignments because it leaves so much interpretation to the listener.
I keep changing my mind as to what is happening, specifically why he is running. It could be that he is running from something or he is running just because of the rain.
Assignment worth 3 stars.
I actually had a lot of fun with this assignment. It was my first time using sound editing software, and Audacity made it very simple to do so.
For my sounds, I got all of them Freesound.org. I took a clip of a man walking on gravel, a crowd talking, a creeky door, a circus, a drum roll, a cannon fire and, finally, a cheering crowd.
I took the walking on gravel sound first and put the talking crowd behind it, but a lower volume so it seemed as if the crowed was farther off and to emphasize the walking. I then made a transition to show him entering the festivities and combined it with the same cheering crowd, only louder to show a more crowded area. I then incorporated the circus music so that it played when the door opened and stopped as the drum roll started, then repeated that same process with the drum roll and cannon fire.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
I made this demo for my students to show them Audacity and basic editing for the Sound Effects Story assignment:
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.
Mine is a tale of a quiet walk in the woods, say up in the in the forests of Show Low Arizona.
All of my sounds are from freesound (http://freesound.org/):
Dry Leaves Walking
http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/33207/
Memory Moon Wet Spaceship Loop
http://www.freesound.org/people/suonho/sounds/27570/
phaser
http://www.freesound.org/people/impactuniversal/sounds/63372/
Gulls by the Sea
http://www.freesound.org/people/acclivity/sounds/13564/
These are all in tracks in Audacity. For the footsteps, I copies a segment, and sped up the speed twice, to make for a sound of hurried walking, then running. I also made a copy of the phaser sound and reversed it to make a loop. A few fade-ins, fade-outs, and bam, done.
For my sound effects story, I created a car ride on my way to work. It’s a nice warm day, so I open my windows allowing me to feel the wind and hear the surrounding traffic…
Sources:
http://www.freesound.org/people/han1/sounds/19025/
http://www.freesound.org/people/RutgerMuller/sounds/50911/
http://www.freesound.org/people/monnie101/sounds/58150/
http://www.freesound.org/people/CGEffex/sounds/99960/
http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/32731/
http://www.freesound.org/people/sonsdebarcelona/sounds/72711/
this assignment I did for the sound effects story audio assignment here is the sound of evolution from baby,toddler, kids, man, and death.
A Soldier Song (slow0.mp3 by cheesepuff
schoolyard.wav by cognito perceptu
Sound Effect Story: The Nether by Matthew Presser
I enjoyed this one once I finally figured out how to record it. In Ubuntu, the system allows you to set the recording device to “analog loopback” (i.e., it sends the total output of your sound card into your sound input, as if you were to record the speakers directly). Windows doesn’t provide any way to do this out-of-the-box (that I could find, anyway). So I turned to Google to help me out. I couldn’t find any audio capture software that was free AND useful. Eventually, I came across this forum post explaining the obvious: just take an 1/8th-inch male-to-male audio cable and feed my headphone output into my analog input. Genius!
For my sound effect story, I decided to take you on a trip through the Nether. You see, recently, I managed to make a mad dash away from the first portal in the Nether and place a second one, which would teleport me away from the portal through which I originally entered the Nether. You get to hear a lot of creepy noise, and a lot of silence. I like the contrast.
I have to admit this became more of a dabbling with “found sounds” rather than what I’d think normally as working with sound effect clips. But I couldn’t help myself as I really enjoyed looking through the open catalog of freesound.org.
This little piece started while trying to manage a moment of personal frustration. Not a good moment, so I started my search with the term “search.” A number of the tracks were recordings of police searches in which you heard the drone of helicopters hovering, intermittent siren bursts, and the clipped chatter on a radio scanner. Not an uplifting set of sounds imagining that there are likely individuals (good or bad) that are in a state of mental and emotional strain hiding from this noise.
But there were other ephemera that came up in my “search” – a person rustling through a pile of wrenches trying to find the right one, a turn of the radio dial looking for a good song for the road, and the ever hopeful imaginers that believe there might be signs of extraterrestrial life in a series of NASA SETI pulses. These are buoyant pieces, and can help bring you back up.
Do It Now DS106 by Not Trivial
This is a complete list of the sound samples used from freesound.org:
SETI Pulses NASA by Dynamicell
Radio Suche (finding a station) by mwirth
Rustling Wrenches by vibe_crc
Helicopter Police Search by daveincamas
Windorgan (Wind sounds at Sea) by klankbeeld
Mysterysnippets (How about now) by NoiseCollector
Pastor Steve Speaking by nicStage
Scare Kids by ERH
Direct Order Do it Now by ERH
For editing, I ended up using the video editor Final Cut Pro, using only the sound tracks, only because I’m really comfortable with it. I do hope to make some time to play around with Audacity though.
