“Spooky Sounds” – This was the best audio assignment EVER! Perfect for upcoming Halloween. I had my 7-year-olds listen as I kept making it spookier and scarier. They totally loved helping and offering criticisms along the way. This time I wanted to have background music, based on a suggestion from Jim Groom when I created […]
Spooky Sounds: (3 Stars)
This was a fun assignment to work on, especially right at Halloween time! I found most of my sounds that I wanted to go with on Freesound.org. The following tracks were downloaded:
Uncle Sigmund: “Chainsaw”
tcrocker68_girl: “girl screaming”
Puniho: “Chainsawing”
Spoonbender: “Wind through trees”
All of the files were uploaded into Audacity.
I also had my son, James, record his insane laugh that he does directly into Audacity with the other tracks. With so many different tracks and so many different volume levels, I had to do a lot of manipulation to make it all work together. James’ laughter was loud so I had to compress the sound to make it a little more manageable. I also did some effects of fading out occasionally so his laughter didn’t over power the audio. I also had to do alot of copy/pasting to make a more realistic screen of the “victim”. A person being sliced by a chainsaw would not scream the same scream over and over. Once I had the levels where I wanted them, I uploaded the audio file into SoundCloud. Enjoy…
Since it is October I thought it was only fitting to complete the Spooky Sounds assignment. I actually had a lot of fun with this one and spent a lot of time on it. I wanted to try to make it creepy and once I got started I could not stop. First, I tried to find some background music. Using youtube I searched through a bunch of different options. I ended up using 2 seperate background noises. One has the Thunderstorm sound and creeking noises while the other is just ominous music. Next, I got the theme songs from The Exorcist and Halloween. I used parts of these to add to the creepy feeling. What I think makes it the most creepy are the songs I have at the beginning and end. It starts out with 2 little girls singing London Bridge is Falling Down in a creepy sounding voice. At the end I finish the song with Ring Around The Rosie in a creepy little girls voice as well. My final touch to the songs was the sound of a little girl running around and just giggling. I don’t know why it adds so much to it but for me at least it really puts me on edge. I really enjoyed this assignment. My song ended up being under 5 minutes so its a longer one but I hope you listen to it and enjoy it. Hopefully it gives you some chills down your back.
3 stars
In light of my obsession with Halloween candy at the moment and the holiday’s fast approach, I decided to do the Spooky Sounds assignment. I used my GarageBand to make this, pulling some creepy audio sounds from it. I interspersed these sounds with portions of noises, screams and other sounds from the show Supernatural, which just put its ninth season on Netflix. I have been catching up all week on Supernatural and thought some of the sounds were perfect for this assignment! I laced them all together and ta da!
3*s
Since Halloween is this month, I decided to create an assignment, worth 3 stars called Spooky Sounds. For this assignment you have to make an audio track using found sounds or your own recordings that is creepy, spooky, scary, halloween-inspired and make it more than a minute long so we have time to get scared!
I started this assignment by collecting some sounds from FreeSound that I thought would sound right in a haunted house. This included bats, squeaky rocking chairs, footsteps, thunder, wind howling, etc. I also added in a slowed down egg timer to build some suspense with the ticking down. I was lucky that when I was looking for some wind chimes that I found a rather creepy version of wind chimes blowing in the wind. So I took my sounds and imported them into Audacity. I slowed down the egg timer and the footsteps in order to build suspense with them. I soften the rocking chair and the bats to make them blend better with the wind and the wind chimes. I also faded in all of my beginning noises that way it would start off awkwardly loud when listeners hit the play button. For the wind howling, I wanted it to come in twice, but I didn’t want to repeat the same noise so what I did is split the wind howling track into two parts and simply dragged the second part into a different section of the overall audio track. The door creaking was surprisingly the most difficult sound to find just because I had a very specific creaking in mind, and most of the creaking doors I found were either the wrong material or the wrong pitch.
Sounds from FreeSound.org
Sounds Used:
1. timer with ding.wav by keweldog (www.freesound.org/people/keweldog/sounds/181148/)
2. bonitoWindchime.wav by plagasul (www.freesound.org/people/plagasul/sounds/602/)
3. footsteps on wood by Mydo1 (www.freesound.org/people/Mydo1/sounds/198962/)
4. bats1.aif by sofie (www.freesound.org/people/sofie/sounds/9721/)
5. wind_howl2_mono.wav by swiftoid (www.freesound.org/people/swiftoid/sounds/117610/)
6. Door – Creak 02.wav by JarredGibb (www.freesound.org/people/JarredGibb/sounds/219492/)
7. Thunder » Dry Thunder3.wav by juskiddink (www.freesound.org/people/juskiddink/sounds/101948/)
Image:
Haunted House by Open Clips (http://pixabay.com/p-151505/?no_redirect)
For this assignment, make an audio track using found sounds or your own recordings that is creepy, spooky, scary, halloween-inspired. Make it more than a minute long so we have time to get scared!
