I did the Sound Effects assignments from the bank. The assignment was rated  3 1/2 stars. I randomly chose this assignment and tried to think of ways I could relate it to our spy theme. I kept drawing blanks until I thought of a typewriter. I had just gotten this new chrome extension that makes your keyboard sound like a typewriter and I instantly thought of a spy. I can just imagine a spy, wearing a fedora sitting on a desk in the middle of nowhere in France writing a letter to his partner back home letting him know how the mission went.

Uploading the sound to SoundCloud was a bit difficult. I feel like I accidentally took the hard route. I first recorded it on my phone, and emailed to myself, then tried to upload it on freesound.com but that didn’t work, cause it was an m4a. So then I tried to record from my phone onto audacity but that didn’t sound good either.  Finally, I had my friend, who had the same extension on her computer, type, while I had audacity recording. I saved it as a .aiff and uploaded onto freesound.com. I am very in love with this typewriter sound, so I think this sounds pretty good.

Check out my final product!

https://www.freesound.org/s/382683/

I haven’t figured out how to embed the free sound onto wordpress yet (can you even do it?) but once I do, ill update this post.

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sounds-effects/

Greetings, fellow agents. I have come across……a strange new sound that I need help making out what it is. It sounds like a bottle or a cup being knocked around but what do you….think? Agent Smith, signing off.

-Agent Smith

I decided to create the sound of ice cubes hitting an empty glass mug. Here it is.

The Sound Effects assignment worth 3 stars said to find a sound lacking on Free Sound. Now in my previous post where I created the Sound Story project I mentioned how I was looking for breathing sounds and they all sounded too deep for what I was trying to do. So I figured this assignment was a perfect opportunity to fix that issue.

As I later realized when I tried to start it though breathing into a microphone was not that easy. Which sounds silly right? Wrong. I ended up recording with a headset because I got onto it a little late and all the HCC microphones where out or broken. (Even the vocal booth mic was checked out which sucked cause I booked that room out but a faculty member had the mic and they can rent it for days on end.) So it took quite a few tries to get some kind of sound at all that was not just static background noise. On a related note I tried to reduce background noise in Audacity but forgot to hold my breath the first few times so my breathing got labeled background. Finally I got it going. I was not 100 % thrilled with the results but I believe they were the best I could get at.

When I went to embed my sound from Free Sound I found it would not do it properly in WordPress. So I also uploaded it to Sound Cloud. Here is the original Free Sound upload and then the Sound Cloud below so it is easy to listen in post.

Usually when I need someone dialing a phone number its someone doing more than a phone number. So I decided  to record me dialing a number and save it for my story that I will be creating this week.

This assignment was to contribute to Freesound. As its helped me out often over the years, it’s the least I could do.

Link to Assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sounds-effects/

Stars: 3

Process: I recorded a video of my friend hitting drumsticks together using my iPhone SE, and stripped the audio out using Audition. The only edit was cropping the beginning silence.

The link to the effect on FreeSound will be posted at a later time, once the file passes review.

The full assignment is linked and listed in its entirety below:

This is a short and simple assignment. Most everyone uses freesound for various audio assignments, but sometimes, you cannot find quite what you are looking for. This assignment is to upload your own sound or sound effect to freesound, preferably something which is lacking.

This assignment is worth 3 stars.

To begin this assignment, I brainstormed ideas for what I could record and tried out some different sounds before my final product. I used QuickTime Player to record this sound and then uploaded into Audacity to edit the effects. I opened QuickTime and recorded my sound, saved it to my computer, and then uploaded to Audacity.

Once my piece was in Audacity, I was able to start editing it. I edited the pitch of my screen to be higher to give the full effect of excitement. To change pitch, I highlighted the section of the recording that I wanted to alter and went to Effects. Change pitch it on the list and I was able to turn the scale up a couple notches.

I then wanted to alter the amplitude of the scream to be the main focus of the recording.

Amplitude is located in the same Effect tab in the list of the many changes you can add to a sound. Lastly, I changed the speed of my recording to be a little faster by going to change speed in Effects.

I exported the file from Audacity and saved it into iTunes and my desktop. I was then able to upload it to freesound.org. 

Go to the website and then click upload sounds in the tip right corner. You will need to make an account if you do not already have one.

I uploaded my sound, changed the name, added descriptions, and then submitted.

My sound is awaiting moderation and will be posted when complete!

Here is my final project!

Sounds Effects – “This is a short and simple assignment. Most everyone uses freesound for various audio assignments, but sometimes, you cannot find quite what you are looking for. This assignment is to upload your own sound or sound effect to freesound, preferably something which is lacking.”

Tutorial:

1. The very first thing to do is go on freesound and try to be creative about which sound effect hasn’t been made
2. Then I went to SoundCloud and click “Upload”
3. Then you want to “start a new recording”
4. Click the big red circle that says “REC”
5. Tell your sister to do a bunch of weird noises and stuff for your recording so she will just moan and groan and whine for your recording
6. Then you just upload the recording and fill out the following info
7. Then head over to the aforementioned freesound to upload your new sound there
8. “Add file”, “upload”, and then “describe sound” in order for it to actually show up
9. DONE! Your new sound effect is now on SoundCloud and freesound for the world to hear

So I decided to try a creative out-of-the-box kind of audio assignment and decided on the sounds effects. I originally wanted my sister to make some weird noises, animal impressions, sing, whatever she wanted so I could record it and make some story about her interesting noise. Instead this is what I get: whining. Plain old preteen angst-y moaning and groaning. Thanks Loren. This is the story about every cliche angst-y preteen ever shown in a movie.

“She’s sitting in the backseat of a minivan, headphones in and rock music blaring. She goes a little too heavy on the eyeliner to look rebellious, even though it’s just that she hasn’t perfected a technique yet. She’s scowling at something, or maybe everything, outside the window. A band tee and ripped jeans is her style today. Her parents speak to her but she either doesn’t care or can’t hear anything over her music. The older sister rolls her eyes at her younger sister, while secretly acknowledging that they’re extremely similar. So here they all are on a “super fun” road trip. The entire 3 hour car ride the youngest sister doesn’t even open her mouth or remove her gaze from whatever is so fascinating about the millions of trees they pass. Suddenly the iPod she was listening to dies and the first words are spoken from this angst-y preteen that leaves her family shocked: “uuuuuuuuugggghhhh”. That’s it?”

I created this assignment because I was impressed with what a wonderful utility freesound is, and felt like inspiring people to not only utilize the sounds there, but also to contribute wherever they could. I was actually inspired to do this assignment originally because a particular sound that I needed for another assignment was just not available. I just set my mic in a decent place, hit record on audacity, and recorded several takes of myself throwing a handful of cards down onto a table. I edited out the bad ones and kept the best few, then uploaded them all to freesound.org for other people to use if they ever find it useful or necessary.

As a side note, as of the time of this posting, my sound effect still had not been moderated, and I think it is causing the embeded post above to fail to load properly. My sound effect is also posted here.