In this week, Michael Branson Smith’s ds106 class is moving into the audio assignments, and I like the concept for a new one he designed, Movie Voice Machines:

Create a voice mail message for a character in a film or tv show. Use samples, impressions, and/or music to create your message.

See what Michael provided for that Vader dude with the breathing problem.

I just gave it a go and made this one for a little guy named “Alfred” who likely is not the best at answering his phone.

Alfred is Not Home

I cobbled this together in Audacity, my main audio editing tool hands down. I downloaded two clips from YouTube (one for the intro music and the other for the closing tone). There are a gazillion ways to do this, I use a Chrome Extemsion- Download Youtube as MP4. It provides a small drop down menu to any YouTube page:

I then did my own imitation in the middle.

Good Eveeeeeeeeeeening.

You can actually import these directly into Audacity (no need to convert to audio) to use for editing.

Preparing for the audio portion of ds106, I decided to create a new assignment, “Movie Voice Machines.” This idea was inspired by a Tim Owens blog post, “This American Life Sex Tape,” which talked about an awesome audio riff on the amazing audio storytellers from This American Life. For Movie Voice Machines you are to create a voice machine message for a character of the movies. Here’s an example of a Cheech and Chong answering machine message.

Voice machines are for the most part an obsolete technology today, but people used to work really hard to create imaginative voice machine messages with music, sound effects and of course their message.

Also this was my first time using Audacity to create any sort of sound work. I followed a couple tutorials from here for setup, and here for basic editing. I’ve used professional tools like ProTools for some time a few years ago, but Audacity was really straight forward and don’t mind really using it.

Here is the list of samples I downloaded and used from freesound.org.

am beep.wav by NoiseCollector
Tape Recorder.wav by Pogotron
OutwardBound.flac by acclivity

For Darth Vader’s voice I added a few of the effects you can find in Audacity, including a pitch shifter and a chorus filter. Finally for the Imperial March music, I played back a sample from Youtube and recorded it from my laptop speakers into the microphone using Audacity. This intentionally degraded the quality of the recording so it sounded like Vader was playing back from an old cassette player into the microphone of an answering machine.

I’m planning to make my own tutorial for Audacity, showing how this was created. And looking forward to some ds106 radio later!