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Another audio assignment, another chance to develop my character. What is good news to a dark, literal, unemotional character? How about getting up in a dystopian universe doing the same tired thing over and over. When I think of a greeting shouted to the world, I immediately think dystopia.
Why do I skip to dystopia right away? I am not a morning person, and unless you are very close to me, you do not want to be there when I get woken up. I could not see being happy in the morning. I especially could not be overtly happy while being in character. fortunately, the dim character helps the message seem a little happier by comparison.
I used 1984 and the telescreens as an inspiration, wherein you were observed from the moment you awoke (not that you weren’t observed while sleeping), and kept on a tight schedule. Everything was rationed, and in this case I decided to make sure that everything in the morning routine was rationed. The bit about chocolate at the end was an attempt to make the morning greeting at least slightly happy, although in 1984 any increase in rations was actually a decrease.
For my third assignment I chose the Good Morning Message For The Village assignment. To record my good morning message, I used Audacity. At first, my greeting was just a very simple “Good morning Mary Washington, I hope you have a wonderful day,” but that to me seemed very dull. I decided to go with a little saying in the good morning message because I thought it might make the message mean a little bit more than just a simple good morning. I remember at a camp I used to go to, there would be a “saying of the day” where one of the camp councilors picked a motivational quote or saying and said it to everyone at breakfast, which is where I got the idea for a good morning saying from.
Hey guys and gals!
This has been an audio kind of week! For this week we were required to make at least 3 audio assignments totaling at least 8 stars. Audio assignments are available from the Audio Assignments Bank on the DS106 website. The main point of these assignments was for us to become more familiar when working with sound. This particular assignment that I chose is worth 2.5 stars and it required for me to make a “Village Announcement”. Here is a link to the exact assignment page: VILLAGE!
The Story
I chose this assignment because I wanted to make a funny parody of a public announcements. Public announcements are fantastic and are extremely helpful in passing along information to a very busy world but the whole concept that we are so digitally connected and that our lives are so fast paced can be looked upon in a comical light. That is why I chose to do an exxagerated and unrealistically happy Village Announcement. The story is that a very happy young lady announces to the village that life is, as always, fantastic even when something bad happens (life a thief stealing a cow). The whole announcement represents the things that societies find important like health, entertainment, protection, and the political atmosphere. It represents these things in a Utopian way because a Utopian world is not possible and we like to remind ourselves of that with humor. To me, this assignment also points out the problem with people “faking” their own happiness and how detrimental it can actually be. There is nothing wrong with living a difficult life (most lives are difficult at one point or another) and instead of pushing aside those troubles, we should embrace them and learn from them.
The Product
The Process
For this assignment, I used both AUDACITY and iMovie. I also used Freesound to download the necessary audio clips. In order to provide a quicker and more visual set of instructions, I went ahead and made a video of the programs I used along with the procedure I followed. Please take a moment to watch it as it shows all the steps you need to take to make a sound clip and goes well with my brief written summary! The first thing I did was to download a bell sound from Freesound and save it to my desktop. The second thing I did was record two sound clips in Audacity because I wanted to make a chippy female voice and a male voice.  I adjusted the voices by selecting the sound clip and going to “effects”, “pitch” and changing the settings accordingly. Once I had all of my files ready in .MP3 format, I opened iMovie and dragged and dropped them into a particular order. I had to shorten some sound clips and adjust a few things but the work was minimal. The final step was to upload my completed file to Soundcloud and then embed it into this blog. Pretty simple for this assignment!
2 stars
I used audacity to record my greeting, at first I didn’t know what to say or what town to use for my greeting. I first decided to think of a town, again I thought back to my favorite series the Wheel of Time, and remembered a small town on a river called Whitebridge. Now that I had picked the town to do my greeting about, my next objective was to think of a good Good Morning greeting. I started with average “Good Morning Whitebridge its a gorgeous day out, enjoy”, this sounded very dry and boring. After changing things and replaying them in my head I figured out what I wanted to say. At which point I practiced saying it out loud to make sure the recording would go well and that it sounded right, I finally felt good about it and settled on what you hear down below. After
Today I am a radio announcer welcoming the new day for my fellow residents in my home town of Whitebridge. Now, my town is not that big but we are happy and have forests surrounding the town. However the best part is that there is a beach nearby on the other side of the forest. This morning looks to be high of 90 degrees and sunny, a perfect day for the residents to head down to the beach to enjoy the sun, maybe get a little bit of a tan. This is the first day in the past 5 days that have not rained, so I am excited to announce this morning of the wonderful day to come.
For week two of  prisoner106, one of the job we were asked to do was to take over the morning announcement for the Village for a day. Amid the recent disruptions I hope I can calm things down a bit.
Here is mine:
Announcement trumpet ripped from video file with MPEGStreamclip
Raven croaking recorded by myself with AudioBoo, a portent of upcoming events in the village?
‘Music’ more in the next post.
All put together in audacity, this post tagged for ds106 Assignments: Good Morning Message for The Village, 2 credits I think I’ll buy a screwdriver.
Goodmorning Message For the Village (Directions)
Description of Assignment: It is always a wonderful thing to hear a bright cheery voice delivering the Good Morning Message in The Village. Why don’t you bring some joy to the day and to your fellow Residents by creating and recording a wonderful message of community and cheer. Share your audio via Soundcloud and tag it appropriately.
For this assignment I first came up with what I wanted to say in my audio recording. Once coming up with what I wanted to say, I began practicing it so I would not mess it up in the recording. I had tons of fun coming up with what to say by the way. I then began recording myself on my Voice Memos app on my iPhone. Once I recorded myself I saved it and sent it to my computer. I then uploaded my audio recording to Soundcloud and shared it.
The reason why I chose this Audio Assignment is because I enjoy doing things like this. I think they are hilarious. I also chose this assignment because when I hear the news in the morning I want to hear a nice awake cheery person, not a groggy person. So, I knew exactly what this assignment was talking about and I thought I would be able to do this task well.
I chose to talk about my hometown Fredericksburg, VA. I engaged the right crowd by starting it off saying “Goodmorning Fredericksburg, this is a message to all my fellow residents.” I also chose to mention the date and time as well as the weather. I then ended it with saying that “I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday weekend and is back home safely and at work.” I thought that this was a pretty good “Goodmorning Message” because this is normally somewhere along the lines as to how most news stations and/or radio stations begin their mornings.
This Audio Assignment is related to the concept of digital storytelling. This is because it is a digital audio recording that tells a story or a message, if you would, to its fellow listeners.
It is always such a wonderful thing to hear a bright cheery voice delivering the Good Morning Message in The Village. Why don’t you bring some joy to the day and to your fellow Residents by creating and recording a wonderful message of community and cheer. Share your audio via Soundcloud and tag it appropriately.
“It’s Another Beautiful Day Here in The Village,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina
A little bird told me that Week Two for #prisoner106 is going to be Audio Week, and that Number 2 wants folks to make a lot of nice Good Morning Announcement Messages to play on the loudspeakers every morning when people are getting up and doing their ablutions and toast and stuff. Â So I decided that it would be a nice thing to make one for everyone to hear. Because of my voice and all.
There are lots of examples of them in the episodes. Look for the parts where Number Six tips his head sideways and then the picture shows one of those little metal boxes (like up above in my GIF) and then a voice comes out of nowhere and says nice things.
Anyway, now that you have seen my GIF, you can listen to my first Good Morning Message.
Isn’t it a nice one? I used that Party Dress song in the background like I found in one of the episodes using Shazam on my iPhone. That app sure is a wonder and lets you find sounds so quickly, especially in a nice clean format to put into an audio project without any of the old hiss from the 1960s and film scratches.
Because of my advance information, this will be an example for a new assignment that Number 2 asked me to make called Assignment 1745: Good Morning Message for The Village. When you do it, you can tag it with AudioAssignments, and AudioAssignments1745 so that it will link into the ds106 Assignment Bank example for that assignment.
