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Audio Week Assignments:

1. Thoughts About Audio Storytelling
2. A Murder Of Crows
3. Create A Place
4. All The Relaxation
5. Remake That Genre!
6. Auditory Hell
7. What A Song Might Mean To You

Audio Summary

What did you learn?

I learned about some sound techniques such as using sound effects, layering, and music. I also learned about storytelling. The Ira Glass videos were quite informative regarding how to tell a story. It’s the most natural thing in the world to speak a story, but writing a story, or even producing a story, is much different. I don’t often consider the parts of a story, how I want the story to progress, what elements I want use to create a mood or give the story a certain pace or rhythm.

This week, I used Audacity for the first time. It wasn’t difficult to use. I have previous experience using sound and video editing programs and this one is similar to what I’m used to. The resources for free sounds and images were most useful during this week. Freesound.org made finding sound effects so easy. I also learned more about copywritten material and the different licenses. Though this was something I looked into on my own.

And, I learned that sites which use programs to auto-determine if something uploaded is copywritten can be wrong. SoundCloud pulled one of my sound clips as being copywritten even though it was under a Creative Commons 0 License.

What was harder than you thought it would be?

The most difficult thing was listening to hundreds of sound files to find the ones I needed. It was time-consuming. Sometimes the files I wanted didn’t exist. Other times, they didn’t have the necessary license for public use.

What was easier?

The idea of working with sound this week was daunting. When I looked at the amount of information included in this weeks resources and assignments, I felt overwhelmed. But when I finally sat down to do the work, it wasn’t that difficult.

Also, it appears that I haven’t been completing the assignments correctly. The whole thing was confusing to me. But it seems that I need to add sound, images, and video even if the assignment doesn’t call for it. Mentally, that felt like a lot of work and I was discouraged about it. I really didn’t even want to do any of the work this week because I was so frustrated. I’m an overachiever and I don’t like not meeting the mark. Anyway, when I finally sat down to work on the assignments, it wasn’t that much extra work. It was much easier now that I know about freesound.org and publicdomainvectors.org.

What drove you crazy? Why?

I find copyrights really annoying. It feels extremely limiting. I’m very confused as to how some people can include copywritten songs on their YouTube channels while others can’t. I want to create my own content in the future and I want to be able to use modern music and such without having to pay to use it. Right now, I don’t really have the time to research this, but in the future I plan to learn more about properly using copywritten materials on my own channels and websites.

What did you enjoy? Why?

I enjoyed listening to the podcasts. Podcasts are a part of my daily life since I spend so much time driving. It was a nice change of pace. Also, I enjoyed creating fuller content on my blog posts. I’m not sure if I met all the requirements yet since the due date hasn’t arrived. Some of the things I added were actually quite trivial. I’m not a believer that adding more content equals engagement. But, that’s because I’m a different kind of person. I’m not impressed with marketing tactics, clickbait, or empty pushes for user engagement. I do recognize that others are. So, I’m trying to change my mindset. I know that if I want to be successful as a content creator, I have to follow all the algorithms and marketing ploys. As annoying as it is to me, I know that it does work for others. I am surprised that I enjoyed adding a bit more content. It’s not quite where I would like it to be. But, I’m getting there through baby steps.

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Prompt: Create YOUR worst sound ever. Take audio clips of every single sound that you hate and put them all together to make The Worst Noise Ever.

This is a 1 star assignment. (NOTE: I’m not sure how these stars are handed out. This assignment took a lot of work. It should definitely be worth more than 1 star.)

#AudioAssignments2140

This week, I spent a lot of time thinking about sounds that I like. But now, it’s time for sounds that I hate. Among these are high pitched sounds, cacophony, crickets chirping, babies screaming, chewing, nails on a chalkboard, girly screams, vomiting, belching, farting, gunshots, etc. There is a long list of things that annoy me. I used 13 sounds in the creation of this audio file. I wasn’t sure about how I wanted to present them. Eventually, I decided on a repetitive kind of sound with everything together, and then ended with the baby crying and the bell ringing.

My ears are very sensitive to sound. I mentioned it in a previous blog post called A Murder of Crows. You can read there for more information. Basically, I my hearing is acute. In daily life, I wear noise cancelling headphones all the time, even in class. Sound can be very dangerous, having the ability to produce waves which destroy everything in its path. Sonic warfare is a thing.

Read more about the destructive power of sound here.

I hesitated to do this assignment because of the negative impact some sounds have on me. Not to mention the PTSD I have from living in a neighborhood with a high crime rate. It’s common to hear gunshots, sirens, and squealing tires in my home. Anyway, after some time of working on this assignment, my daughter came to my room and asked me to turn down the sound on my laptop or put in headphones! I guess I got the desired impact from my sound clip. Hopefully you don’t like it anymore than I did!

And, just to send you unhappily on your way, here is a fun YouTube video of the 13 most annoying sounds. Can you last through all 13?

When it comes to doing work, whether its for a job, for a class, or to reach a personal goal, there will always be the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some assignments will focus a lot on the good, digging into your creativity and making you feel nothing but pleased, while others will bring up the bad and the ugly and see what you can do to manipulate it. This assignment does exactly that, prompting you to reach inside and find the sounds that are absolutely the worst to you. I almost didn’t do this assignment because it seemed like torture, but it ended up being quite fun and funny to create this horrid mashup.

During the process of creating, I knew I wanted to find the 5 sounds that bother me the most in life. The immediate first thought I had was babies crying, as I’ve had countless horrible experiences involving babies crying nonstop for literal hours. It’s a piercing noise that I hate like no other, so of course that had to be added to the concoction. Next, I began thinking about my dog. He’s a sweet old man that means no harm and has a spot in the middle of the stairs that he prefers to lay in all day. Unfortunately, this spot comes equipped with a window that points directly out to the road and sidewalk. This means any time anyone drives or walks by, my dog meets them with an ensemble of barking. Because he’s so old, his vision and hearing are quite bad, so often times he’ll keep barking without truly realizing it, and other times he’ll start barking for no reason. I hate it, so there’s my second sound.

Then, I started to get a little stumped so I started to brainstorm what an average person may be annoyed by and almost immediately two noises came directly to mind: chewing and tapping. I’m not sure how I hadn’t thought of these, but they are by far some of the most annoying sounds you can come across in your everyday life. These had to be thrown into the mix, but I felt like I needed an extra layer of obnoxiousness to really tie everything together into one horrible, chaotic masterpiece. That’s when it hit me: dial up. I hadn’t thought of it because I haven’t heard it “in nature” very many times, but it has to be one of the most obnoxious and wild noises I have ever heard, adding the exact amount of flavor I needed to wrap up this madness.

I’ve combined a synth noise, with a TV static noise. It’s more unsettling than awful, but I guess it would be awful depending on how you see things.

I was tasked to create a hellish sound full of the worst possible sounds I could think of. At first, I thought this might be difficult. I usually don’t have sounds that I hate. In fact, I love the sound of nails on a chalkboard. But, not all sounds sound great. Hopefully, with the horrible … Continue reading “If Hell Were a Sound”

Another assignment that I created from the assignment bank was called “Auditory Hell”. This challenged us to create a sound involving multiple of our worst favorite sounds. I also used garage band for this because it was easier to mash together all of the sound effects. This was hard for me because I literally cringed at every single sound. For this I used 4 different sounds: Nails on a chalkboard, Aggressive Chewing, Snoring, and an Alarm Clock. I thought that we could use this assignment within our radio show for an audience check. What I mean by that is to make sure the audience is still listening and they may tweet in their answer of which of the 4 sounds is the absolute worst.

Google Chrome converted into a sound file sounds glorious; it makes a great alarm https://soundcloud.com/user-579284186/bad-audio

Fair warning: you probably won’t like this. But that’s the challenge of the assignment: create something BAD!

The idea behind this challenge was to take an assortment of sounds and mix them together. The result should be… a very bad sound!

Hope you guys… don’t enjoy?

Can you identify the sounds that were mixed together? I had a lot of fun finding creative and bad-sounding sounds. Mixed together, you have a squeaky pulley, a demonic woman screeching, and… a squishy pumpkin! Just in time for Halloween I guess.

The details of the assignment can be found below: