The next assignment that I decided to complete was the theme music audio assignment. For this assignment i decided to make it about my character Black. In this theme song, i used a sound that represented bullets being shot and hitting near by and a zippo being used to light a cigarette. I also used the instrumental of I Mean It by G-Eazy.
Your Theme Song (4 Stars)
I chose the audio assignment “Your Theme Song”, well because I’ve always wanted to create one, and now I have a great excuse to do so. That being said, this assignment took a me almost an hour to create because I had to chose, which songs and sound effects I wanted to include in my theme song. The background music is “Going Under” by the band Evanescence. I chose them because I love their songs. The sound effects included in theme song are explosions, a rocket starting up and an Irish flute playing.
All of the sound effects I got from freesound.com. My goal was to show the listener that my theme song is fast paced, complex, mysterious and convoluted. I felt my theme song met all of these requirements.
Shelley Layton now has a theme song as a result of the “Your Theme Song” Audio Assignment. I altered this assignment a bit because instead of creating a theme song for myself, I created one for my original character. The music and sound effects I used came from the freesound users soulman-90, yuval, cgeffex, qubodup, and bulbastre. The audio clips were spliced together in Audacity and the background image is a free wallpaper. The ticking watch gives the theme an even pace, the piano music steadily rises the tension, and the theme comes to a its highest tension when you hear the gun being cocked and a door being broken in. I’m really glad that I decided to have the piano fade out as the gun was fired, because it makes the shots ring out louder. I wanted to only have the watch’s audio at the beginning and ending of the theme because it is a constant throughout the whole song and the watch is one of the items most closely connected with Shelley, so hearing it in her daily life would be natural. In this scenario, she would be on a case and hiding from someone who has been tailing her for a while, which then leads to her confronting this individual at the end of the theme. This is probably my favorite Audio Assignment of the week so far.
Assignment Value: 4 stars
For my third assignment of the week, I kept my acoustic guitar out after using it in my commercial. I wanted to mess around with it, since I recently discovered I was lacking a cable to my old amp. So, I found the theme assignment, and decided to write Donnie Rawlen a little motif.
I spent an evening making this, strapped to my headphones, computer, and using a mix of my voice recorder and my iPhone’s Voice Memo app. Honestly, I don’t think there’s much to write about my process–I played my guitar and recorded a bunch of riffs after laying down the melody. After I looped the melody, I added the harmony guitar line. I listened to that and realized the song was lacking a bit of bass, so I recorded a really simple bass line and layered the three together.
After that, I removed a few sections from the harmony, so the melody and bass line could work off one another for a little while, and staggered their introductions.
Reflecting, I notice it has a bit of an Asian influence in its style, which ends up being rather fitting for Donnie, since he carries around a Chinese Dragon stamp, and a Buddhist pyramid. It was an admittedly unintentional wrap-around, but I’ll take it.
On a non-thematic note, I know the melody and harmony get a bit un-synced part way through, but it’s the first song I’ve ever written, recorded, or produced, so there’s the amateur factor at play.
Anyways, I hope you like it!
This assignment is worth 4 stars and it is an opportunity to create my own theme music. I went to SoundBible and got a couple of sound effects there. The rest I just picked up from other sites. The only thing about SoundBible is that it is hard to navigate in otherwise great source and have lots of choices. Enjoy my track and feel free to write a comment.
This Theme Song assignment is an audio assignment for the week of 2/16 to 2/22 and fulfills 4 out of 5 stars meant to focus on the character Tom Blair.
Since Tom is a character who would not have access to things like YouTube and SoundBible, this post will not be written from his perspective, although I have not been consistent with this in the past.
Tom’s theme song is relatively simple: it’s the song made famous by Casablanca, ‘As Time Goes By’. The song is accompanied by cricket chirps in the background. I think this suits him, as Tom is a bit of a romantic and also embodies much of what Humphrey Bogart represented- the ‘Hardboiled Detective‘.
I made the song by first watching this video, determining where I would start the track (at 1:23), and converting it into an mp3 using this converter (different from the one suggested in the prompt).
After putting the song into Audacity, cutting the first minute and twenty three seconds out, and choosing where to end the song, I inserted this cricket sound effect onto the track. I faded the effect into the beginning of the song, so that it can be heard throughout if one listens carefully.
SoundCloud insists that this track is copyrighted, but since I think this is fair use, I have inserted it here as a media file instead:
Your Theme Song (4 Stars)
So I chose this assignment to fulfill the remaining stars that needed to relate to my character. I’m hopeful that it may somehow be incorporated into our radio show as well. I began thinking about this assignment by wanting to find a way to show the two sides of Sarah Mustard, because in her personal life she is quiet and a little lost, but in her work life she has a lot of zest and can be inquisitive and intuitive. I also really liked the idea of keeping all the music piano music, because I really enjoy piano music, but I also think it would be somewhat symbolic because while the tone of the music is changing it still remains consistently piano music.
I used four different sounds/music to create this theme song. I started out with thunderstorm noises again, because I think it adds to Sarah’s noir character and also it made a good background to have the rain. I feel like the rain in the back is kind of like Sarah’s lingering sadness. The beginning music was called Lost Music and I felt like it showed Sarah’s lostness and loneliness. The music then transitioned into segue music which I think shows Sarah’s questioning and observation skills. The music is kind of unsettling and makes you believe something is up and it is Sarah’s job to find out. Then I incorporated another crash of thunder to transition into the last bit of the theme song which was called confused music but I didn’t really think of it as confused. I thought of it more as Sarah getting out of her melancholy and going out and facing the world. I then ended again with a fade out into the rain.
It was really hard to find the inspiration to make this. but once I finally got into this assignment it wasn’t so bad. I really liked the challenge I created for myself of trying to get different pieces of music to flow nicely together. I am pretty happy with what I was able to create.
Believe it or not, Victoire Absinthe has her own theme music- she struts into a joint, the lights drop, the music starts, and all you can hear is this…
To create this sound, I used the sound of heels on a marble floor, Miles Davis, and gunshots. Not exactly what I would consider a typical, “theme song”, but I figured it was the kind of theme that would actually happen in real life, which I think is just as interesting. This is building off my other post, Chirping With Happiness, to give you really obvious clues to what Victoire does for a living…. Hopefully it’s incredibly clear by now.
This assignment was worth 4 stars, and here is the LINK to the original assignment if you want to give it a whirl.
For my second audio assignment this week I chose to create Your Theme Song (worth 4 stars). This is the other assignment that I chose to dedicate to my character (total 6 stars towards character this week). The assignment included having to create a theme song using instrumentals, sound effects, etc. It was hard to choose a song for this because I hadn’t thought about what Lawrence might like. I ended up going to Eminem’s “Not Afraid” because the song has a good beat to it and has that kind of bad-assy feel to it. I added sound effects to the beginning and ending to make it more relatable to Lawrence. I got those from a variety of sound effect websites. It was not very hard to layer all of these together because I knew where I wanted the sound effects, it was just the act of placing them and lining them up so they fit right with the music. I think it would be fun to do this assignment as a theme song for myself if I ever were to do it again (since that is the assignment) because I feel like I could create an awesome theme song for myself. Anyways, here is Lawrence’s theme song!
4 stars
I decided to do the audio assignment about a theme song. I dedicated this to my character dossier Sylvia. For the audio I compiled some noir jazz, wolf whistling to signify when Sylvia walks into the room, and the famous quote from Sandy in Grease “Tell me about it, Stud”! I hope you enjoy!
