Sound Effects Story – “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.”

Tutorial:

1. First I had to decide on what story I wanted to tell (relate-able, funny, dramatic, scary?)
2. I decided on scary so I went to freesound.org and typed in “scary” into the search bar to get some ideas
3. I found seven different sounds I wanted to use and therefore had to download (big yellow rectangle) each sound
4. I not only had to download each sound but had to save it to a file I knew I can find later to open in Audacity
5. I opened all seven sound effects in Audacity and listened to them so I could figure out which pieces I wanted to use and in what order
6. I opened up the sound I wanted first and kept the knocking while cutting the other sounds after it
7. Then I went to the next sound, went to “edit” to copy and paste this sound after the first one, repeating this until each sound effect was used and in the order I wanted
8. Then I was done but instead of just saving, I had to export it to somewhere I could find later and upload to SoundCloud

So to start off with: this was hard! Looking back it wasn’t hard as in 5 star difficulty, just hard to figure everything out in Audacity. I’m not sure how many times I yelled out, “WHY? WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?” In the end I felt great creating a story through a new media. I never would have even found Audacity if not for this class. Some things I had to figure out included how to copy and paste a sound, how to cut parts of a sound out I didn’t want and add a sound onto the first one, and exporting the audacity file to something I can use to upload to SoundCloud. Oh and this was my first upload on SoundCloud so that’s pretty cool!

As soon as I saw this assignment I knew I wanted to do a horror audio. This idea probably came to me because I had just listened to Ghost Stories by Radiolab the day before which included a plethora of haunting sound effects. What inspiration! So now I should probably tell you the story I was imaging for my audio clip. Looking back I could have added some more sound in, but what I imagined in my mind was more of an outline, so forgive me for my improv storytelling. Some of you may be horror movie buffs like me, but if not, you can probably hear all the cliches I mashed into just a few measly seconds. Here goes:

“I was quietly sitting in my room on a foggy night, knitting, when I abruptly heard a few knocks at the door. Being an older lady, I have found myself feeling quite impulsive and trusting. (I’ll die when my time comes). I peered at the clock to notice that it was almost midnight. I shrugged to myself thinking it was just the neighbor boy coming over to ask for some sugar for his cookies again. So I slowly made my way over to the door to take a quick glance through the peephole. Nothing. Total blackness. A complete and utter void. However, I recalled that the neighbor boy was rather short so I slowly creaked open the door to see a rather tall and menacing dark figure in a black robe. He slowly pointed at me and my knees shook. I tried to back away, run, anything, but all I could do was scream for my life. Or what was left of it. Because he quickly stabbed me with his scythe and I dropped to the floor with a thud. He then gathered me into his arms and we disappeared. All that was left was my empty apartment. Looking back I’m not sure why I screamed, for as scary as he seemed, he was just there to do his job. His career may be a gruesome one, but no one ever said Death liked his job. Did anyone even ask him? Does anyone ever say anything to him, other than just screaming and begging for their lives? No, looking back I am not sure why I screamed. I thought I was ready to go. ‘I’ll die when my time comes,’ I always say, so why is it that the very last breath I took was to scream? I guess in the end, we all fight to live.”