When it comes to doing work, whether its for a job, for a class, or to reach a personal goal, there will always be the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some assignments will focus a lot on the good, digging into your creativity and making you feel nothing but pleased, while others will bring up the bad and the ugly and see what you can do to manipulate it. This assignment does exactly that, prompting you to reach inside and find the sounds that are absolutely the worst to you. I almost didn’t do this assignment because it seemed like torture, but it ended up being quite fun and funny to create this horrid mashup.

During the process of creating, I knew I wanted to find the 5 sounds that bother me the most in life. The immediate first thought I had was babies crying, as I’ve had countless horrible experiences involving babies crying nonstop for literal hours. It’s a piercing noise that I hate like no other, so of course that had to be added to the concoction. Next, I began thinking about my dog. He’s a sweet old man that means no harm and has a spot in the middle of the stairs that he prefers to lay in all day. Unfortunately, this spot comes equipped with a window that points directly out to the road and sidewalk. This means any time anyone drives or walks by, my dog meets them with an ensemble of barking. Because he’s so old, his vision and hearing are quite bad, so often times he’ll keep barking without truly realizing it, and other times he’ll start barking for no reason. I hate it, so there’s my second sound.

Then, I started to get a little stumped so I started to brainstorm what an average person may be annoyed by and almost immediately two noises came directly to mind: chewing and tapping. I’m not sure how I hadn’t thought of these, but they are by far some of the most annoying sounds you can come across in your everyday life. These had to be thrown into the mix, but I felt like I needed an extra layer of obnoxiousness to really tie everything together into one horrible, chaotic masterpiece. That’s when it hit me: dial up. I hadn’t thought of it because I haven’t heard it “in nature” very many times, but it has to be one of the most obnoxious and wild noises I have ever heard, adding the exact amount of flavor I needed to wrap up this madness.

This assignment was extremely exciting to me at first glance. Honestly, I’m glad that it was assigned because I probably would have picked it anyways. When addressing this prompt, the first thing I thought about was setting. Where was this going to take place? Would it be in a diner, at the park, in a quiet room at night? Then, I figured that since this would be my first attempt at something like this, I should keep it pretty basic and have it represent one single person’s interactions, aside from background noise. I started by placing in an office ambience background noise with chatter, phones ringing, and other small noises that fill up space. Then, I found a crisp typing noise to establish an activity for the character to be initially doing. I wanted to display frustration in some way, so I figured the most fitting source of frustration in the office, early in the morning, is spilling your coffee or water. I found a fantastic spill noise, but thought that it could get even more frustrating than that. With the addition of a glass breaking noise, the scene is set for a great deal of anger. But how do we express that? Initially, I’ll admit, I fit in a clip of a woman mumbling, “dammit,” after it happens, but I realized that this assignment is strictly nonverbal. I went back in and removed that sound and tried to think of the perfect thing to replace it. That’s when it came to me: smashing the keyboard! It was quite easy to find a recording of someone smashing their keyboard, so I plugged that straight in and we had our little story. The story of the spill.