For my final assignment, I decided to do Sound of your Day.  It was rated 4 stars. It is not the sounds of my day personally, it’s the sound of our wonderful agent Mac. She didn’t have a very eventful day from the sound of it.

I recorded everything using the memo app on my phone and uploaded it all to audacity. Once it was in audacity, I started cutting different parts to blend better and make it sound smoother. Once it sounded the way I wanted it to, I decided to add a bit of background spy music to really set the mood of a spy’s day.

I found the background music off of the Creative Commons search. Once I put it into audacity, I lowered the volume on it so that it didn’t overpower the actual day.

This is my final product.

Archives

For this assignment, I had to take sound clips from throughout my day and combine them into one long clip.

My family went snowboarding last weekend at Wintergreen Resort and I thought that would be a fun time to take the recordings. I don’t actually have a voice recorder or anything so I ended up recording the sounds as videos on my iPhone. Then, I used audacity to upload them and combine them together. I actually had to download an Audacity add-on in order to use the sound from the videos so that was an extra step. Once I figured out how the Audacity program worked (required reading some online manuals and wikihow articles) the process wasn’t too bad. Honestly, having never used Audacity or any other similar programs, doing this as my first assignment this week might not have been my best idea but I made it work!

The finished product isn’t that bad but you can tell some of the clips didn’t come through as well as the others. Listen for your self!

(Disclaimer-very end of clip came from a game of Cards Against Humanity. Language isn’t too bad but it can be considered a bit crude by some people so listen at your own risk lol)

sound cloud:

Throughout my day today I recorded several different sounds and compiled all of them into one stream that I uploaded on my SoundCloud Page. These are just some normal things I hear walking to and from class on a daily basis! I woke up, drove to campus, had two classes, ran to lunch and came home! This assignment is worth 4 stars in the assignment bank. I think this assignment relates to our discussion on the internet and story telling because if you listen to my video it tells you a story of what I did today. It can infer where I was, what I was doing, who was there, all key points in storytelling uploaded into a SoundCloud mp3. Enjoy!

#ds106

For this weeks DS106 Assignment Bank Audio creation I chose to complete “Sounds of Your Day.” I first discovered this assignment last week, when trying to understand what exactly an “Assignment Bank” was exactly. I was first drawn to it, because right now my days are pretty LOUD. With one week left of school, my kids are LOUD.

The audio assignment asked us to record the sounds of our day, and to then combine them into one long sound of our day. Originally I thought, no problem…I’ll just record a bit here and there throughout the day…I got this. However, life quickly got in the way, and I recorded bits and pieces over two or three days-totally breaking the rules. In my defense, my days during the week all have similar sounds throughout, so I planned to cut them all together to make one long sound of a day.

In order to create the audio I first recorded sounds on my iPhone. What I planned on doing with them next was a mystery to me until I came across my classmates blog (thank you Lauren!). We had luckily chosen the same audio assignment and she connected me with a full tutorial, thanks to this blog. Social networking at its finest.

I had never used Audacity before so once I had downloaded it and imported my audio I happily discovered that I could listen to all of my audio recordings, together, at the same time, overlapping, in a crazy jumbled mess, and I sort of fell in love. The past few weeks have been busy, and as I said earlier, my fourth graders have been loud, so the jumbled mess seemed appropriate. Instead of cutting and pasting the sounds together, I let them overlap. To most I think it will sound awful, but to me it sounds like my life, with kids singing, Kid President advice, 5th grade graduation assemblies, throwback music, and more kids.

Here is a list of what you will here in order (as best I could):

Outkast’s Hey Ya!, Lion King, my students celebrating about taking a selfie, 4th graders singing along to Lion King, Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio, typing at my computer, me thanking a student for raising her hand instead of shouting out, 5th grade graduation, Kid President video, 4th graders doing partner work

Warning: it starts out loud

For my first Audio Assignment I decided to record the sounds of my day. As a teacher, the sounds of my daily routines sound very different now than they did three weeks ago, which is one reason I wanted to complete this assignment!  I would love to go back and record the sounds of my day during a typical school day and compare the two.  My weekdays over the summer are generally pretty predictable, with only the times in which I complete certain activities changing (and the occasional meet up with friends thrown in there!).  I used voice memos on my phone to record sounds throughout my day yesterday.  I had my phone by my side as I brewed and drank my coffee on my deck after my husband left for work and while my son was still asleep (so nice), while I watched Minions for the hundredth time this summer, while I worked on this class, went to the pool, went to crossfit (sorry in advance for some of the foul language by some friends that were in the background at the gym), and while I read to my son and read my own book with my sparkling water to end the day.

Recording the voice memos was easy, but at the end of the day I realized I had no idea how to get those voice memos into one sound bite and in a form that I could share.  Luckily, when I clicked on the first example from this audio assignment, I got a full tutorial on how to do just that!  I sent the memos to my computer and imported them all into one file, following the steps  listed in the example above to cut and paste the clips to fit together.  When I had a finished product I simply uploaded it to Soundcloud.  I struggled through this one, but I think I came out with a pretty decent final product.

So today I decided to record some audio of my typical workday for this assignment. Hopefully the sounds make it clear about what I was doing in the clip.

Behind the Creation

I am currently a intern at Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center. I commute from my home in Fredericksburg to King George and work a typical 40 hours a week. So I decided that for this assignment I would record some audio of me driving to work, walking to my office, doing work, etc. I guess it gives you guys some idea of how a typical work day sounds for me. I enjoyed making this assignment since I feel like telling a story through sound it more straight forward since you do not have to worry about making it look nice. It is like what Jad Abumrad said about you provide the listener the means of creating the image of the scenario for you.

The Process

To create this little audio story I used my iPhone 6 to record the audio clips using the Voice Memo’s

I pressed the record button whenever I wanted to record some sounds, and as you can see the area above the time is showing me the sound and volume of the sound being picked up. I can press the red pause button to pause the recording.

After pausing the recording, the button turns back to a red circle. I can tap it to continue recording audio if I would like. I decided to tap “Done” to complete and save my recording.

After tapping “Done”, a pop-up menu appears asking to name the recording. I can either tap “Save” to save the recording with the name I chose or “Delete” to delete the recording and start over. I chose to tap “Save” in this case.

I entered in the name I desired for this recording and then I tapped “Save” to save the recording.

After I recorded all the audio clips I needed, I transferred all the audio clips to my computer. I opened Audacity and opened one of my audio files.

After opening the audio file, the file shows up in the editor. Now I went on to import the other audio files into the project as well.

I went to “File” and selected “Input” which opened a menu from which I selected “Audio” since I am importing an audio file.

The audio file now appears underneath the main one.

I then selected the audio clip by highlighting the entire sound time line. I then clicked the “Cut” button circled in red on the picture. This cuts the audio from its original place and copies it to my clipboard.

I then clicked at the end of the main sound timeline since that was where I wanted to insert it. Then I clicked on the “Paste” button circled in red on the picture to paste the audio clip I just cut from below.

After clicking “Paste” the audio piece shows up at the place where I had selected for it to appear. I did this same process with all the other audio clips, opening them, cutting, and then pasting them to the end of the main audio clip.

After I had clipped and pasted all the audio I wanted to, I went to “File” and selected “Export Audio” to save the .wav file of the new audio clip I pieced together to my local computer.

A pop-up menu appeared which prompted me for a input to name the file. After giving it the desired name I clicked “Save”

I could also give the file some other attributes if I wanted to though I did not need to for this audio clip so I left it blank and clicked “Ok” which then created and saved the file for me.