Using the audacity program, I took some sounds from the free sound cloud, taking small bits and putting it into a story without using words. I used one word throughout it though, “Taxi!” because I thought it was the best way to show that the person had traveled into the city to go to work and to describe why he was in a car in the first place.

It was hard to figure out how to cut / crop the sound pieces, so that they didn’t carry on too long or get repetitive. At first I had randomly picked sound effects but a couple stuck out to me, like the Rooster noise, so I decided to create a morning image with my audio and then turned it into a daily morning routine. In my story, I made it so a man in a country town drove to work in the big city, only to have a fatal accident on what seemed like a normal day.

Sound Effects Story: Tell a story using nothing but sound effects.

The Story Behind the Story

These days were Adam’s favorite. The rain fell gently, and the air was crisp with chilled humidity making the pavement of the carport feel damp. He sat with his legs splayed out in a V formation before him, toe to toe with his brother Andrew. They were gingerly rolling a foam ball back and forth between. Each time the ball came to Andrew, he left deep depressions in the shape of his small hand and watched the ball grow slowly back into its original form. Adam barely let the pads of his finger tips make any impression on the ball, rather allowing the smooth outer covering to slide under his fingers. He always wanted to feel as much as he could, with every moment. Right now he could feel the thick air resting on his skin more than anything, but he also felt the dull sensation of small pebbles slowly indenting themselves into the back of his calves as they rested on the pavement. He felt a subtle ache in his lower back, he had been sitting stiffly for what felt like hours. Andrew had begged him to help him reach the arts and craft bin from the upper shelf in the carport, but Adam wanted to sit with his brother and watch the storm brew, he promised to pull the bin down later.
There hadn’t been any lightning but soft rolling thunder undulated in the distance, like a soft warning that something bigger was on its way. As Adam slid his fingers off the smooth surface of the ball, again sending it spinning slowly towards Andrew, a bright light began to claim the horizon. It happened slowly at first, and then all at once, a consuming and powerful rush struck his face slapping him with invisible heat making his skin warm to the touch. Overhead, something large and foreign soared fiercely towards the two boys, and suddenly their world was in motion. There was no flame, no bomb was dropped.
An invisible force struck them, and around their feet the carport crumbled, in the distance were screams. Sound continued to pummel what was once a proud town. Disaster had gripped every living soul, had wrapped itself around everything that could have once been cherished and crushed it. Adam lay beneath the rubble of the carport, toys were scattered like casualties among fallen shelves and torn drywall. Andrew stood mostly unscathed, the arts and crafts bin had tumbled right to his feet, spilling only a few of its contents. His eyes darted around the ruins, looking for his brother. The sounds in the distance started to grow louder, he thought of his most recent science class. They had talked about the Doppler effect. He shouted to his brother to move, he shouted to himself to move. He didn’t move.

The Tutorial

To complete this assignment, I downloaded sound effects from a sound effect website called Free Sound. I simply searched for the sounds that I wanted to use to generate my story and then downloaded them, and imported them into audacity.

Once in audacity, I was able to organize the sound bits in the order that would generate the story I wanted to portray. I edited the sound bites by cutting a few sections out in a few effects and using the “fade in” and “fade out” effects. Once completed I exported the clip and uploaded it to my SoundCloud account. The effects that I used include:

Timbre: loud jet-ish fly by
Design dean: Kids “WOAH”
Scream Studio: Scary Horn
Wjoojooo: Stan Throwing a Fit
Jgrzinich: Rain Storm
Scream Studio: Ambient one shot
Klankbeeld: Horror Insects
Starscade: distant fireworks
Klankbeeld: thunder suburb
Tommccan: explosion
Allanz10d: explosion simulation
Rhonturn: people on carnival rides

Wake up. Boot Up. Log in. Hack. Shut down. Wake up. Boot Up. Log in. Hack. Shut down. Wake up. Boot Up. Log in. Hack. Shut down. On repeat for weeks until the problem is cracked. Anything from hunting bugs in a program to breaking into another secure computer. Forget to eat? Redbull and vodka. Forget to sleep? Redbull and vodka. This is your life now. You haven’t shaved in weeks. You thrive on the numbers and strings. You breathe binary. You know no other life. Wake up. Boot Up. Log in. Hack. Shut down.

Thus is the daily grind of a programmer. Now, I do have to say, most real programmers use GNU/Linux (or at least some other *nix like macOS or BSD), but the Windows XP sounds were so believable. And dial-up is so outdated, but what better way to convey getting online? I mean, if I’m using a decade year old OS, why not throw in a two decade old technology too? Splicing these tracks together in Audacity was no problem.

Sound effects can be found listed below:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN3xp8uOVL4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxDQWtXSVpA
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nQ2oiVqKHw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb2jGy76v0Y

This is my first audio assignment and was the one assignment that we were required to complete this week. We had to create a story only using sound effects, no voices. I used freesound.org to find the sound effects I used for my story. I started my story off slow with a guy just walking down the street. He then enters a gas station and the bell on the door rings as he walks in. His footsteps come to a complete stop and you hear him fire a gun and a lady screams and then you hear two more shots fired. He rushes over to the cash register and opens it and starts taking out all of the cash. He starts to flee the scene, but only a few seconds later as he is running down the street, police sirens start going off in the distance and begin to get closer and closer. The story ends with the sirens and leaves the ending to the story open for the viewer to decided whether the robber gets away or if he ends u getting caught by the police and arrested.

Assignment: Sound Effects Story

Stars: 3.5

I created this audio story on Audacity.

Step 1: Find the sounds you want to use in your story on freesound.org or another free sound website.

Step 2: After opening Audacity, click File -> Import -> Audio and choose a sound you wish to add to your story.

Step 3: Click the selection tool at the top and highlight the parts of the sound that you want to delete and then click Edit -> Delete.

Step 4: When you add another sound using Step 2 again, you can click on the Time Shift Tool at the top to move the sound effect to where you want it to start in relation to the sound effect(s) that you already have.

Step 5: Repeat Steps 2-4 until your story is finished.

Step 6: Click File -> Export Audio to save your story.

Jeremy is a rather lonely man in a very nice apartment. He inherited the piano in his living room from his grandparents when he was very young, and learned how to play it mostly just because it was there. If he had any dreams of playing professionally, he’s left them behind, content to wake up, go to work, and then come home to the piano and to his cat, Nuisance. Living up to her name, Nuisance has been restless lately. She’s knocked over glasses, stolen Jeremy’s food off of his plate while he was eating, and yelled all night long. Jeremy figured it would be nice to get another cat to keep her company while he was away. However, the two don’t get along quite as well as he’d hoped they would.

This assignment was really interesting to me, and I might have tried it even if it hadn’t been required. Learning about audio storytelling this week and listening to the stories we’ve been directed towards, I’ve found that sound effects are really important in a story.

As was recommended, I started looking for sound effects for my story on freesound.org. I already had an idea for a story in mind, which made browsing for the effects a little easier. Eventually, I gathered up nine sounds: two kinds of thuds, two kinds of dissonant piano noises, the main piano track, the sound of cats fighting, the sound of pages flipping, the sound of a chair creaking, and the sound of a person making shushing noises.

The next step was to put these sounds together on Audacity. I had never used Audacity for anything but recording a single voice before, so I was intimidated by the time it might take to learn how to use it to edit sounds. However, I went ahead and threw myself into it, knowing I would understand the program eventually.

The first step was to open Audacity and my main piano track. I also opened another file with the first of the thudding noises that I downloaded. I then highlighted over the thudding noise, went up to ‘Edit’, and hit ‘Copy’.

After I had copied that bit of audio, I went back to my main piano track and pasted the thudding noise at the end of it.

Before I added any more noises, I wanted to make sure that I got my timing right when the cats fighting jumped in. However, you can’t layer noises and have them play at the same time as each other with only one track. I went up to ‘Tracks’, ‘Add New’, and then clicked ‘Stereo Track’. At first I had clicked ‘Mono Track’, but you can’t copy and past audio onto a Mono Track. So, Stereo Track it was.

Now I could add in the cats fighting while all the startled thudding and discordant piano notes were going on. I opened up the cats fighting audio in another separate Audacity window, copied the section of cat fighting noises that I wanted, and pasted it onto the second track around where the thudding began. I also copied and pasted the second thudding noise so that I could have a better frame of reference. Something important to remember around this point is that you don’t need to paste the audio in the exact perfect spot. In the same way that you can highlight a bit of audio in Audacity and delete it, you can highlight empty space and delete that. You can adjust your track’s position as needed.

Now, you could see a bit of a story with my audio. However, it still needed more flavor. I copied and pasted in my two discordant piano tones, as well as the sound of a chair creaking to signal that Jeremy was paying attention to the cats now. Afterwards, I pasted in the sound of the person shushing the cats. All of the first tracks sounds were sequential, but the continued sounds of the cats fighting underneath it gave it more depth and movement. At that point, I could have called my story done, but I felt that the first part of the story was a little empty and sounded more like an intro to the story than part of the story itself. I went and found the sound of pages turning, to signal that the person was actively playing the piano in the story.

This is where the knowledge that I could delete empty space especially came in handy, as pasting in the pages flipping pushed my cat fighting noises forward and ruined the timing. I simply deleted extra space in between the two noises until the cat fighting audio was back where it had been before.

I exported my story as a .WAV file and uploaded it to Soundcloud. After that, my story was complete! Hopefully, someday, these two cats will see eye to eye.

Guidelines for this assignment can be found here.

The required assignment for this week was to make an audio clip that tells a story completely with sounds effects. My inspiration came from when I was a kid going to baseball games with my dad. I always remember driving to stadiums and the closer you walk to the stadium the more the chants come into focus. Until you walk up to your seat and you can perfectly hear the cheers. And when someone on your team gets a hit and the stadium erupts. That was my inspiration for this assignment. So the first step was to get all of the sound effects. I went to freesound.org and downloaded a bunch of sound effects that I thought I might use. Next, I imported all of them  into audacity and dragged them up or down depending on what order I wanted them to come in the story. Next, use the move tool to drag each sound effect to the end of the previous, that way they come one after another. It should look something like this:

Next, highlight all the tracks (ctrl + a), go to the tracks menu and choose mix and render. This will combine all of the individual tracks into one:

It should end up looking something like this:

And that’s it! You’re done. You can go ahead and listen to my sound effect story here:

Last post of the day, can I get a hollah!?

Today I did my first attempt at editing audio and completed the required audio assignment, sound effects story. I’m actually quite pleased with how it came out though it’s not an exciting tale…it is one that I relate to personally.

The story I wished to portray was one that I wanted everyone to relate to. Those nights of light rain, endless studying, copious amounts of caffeine, and long sighs…that’s the student life.

The girl in this audio is definitely reminiscent of myself. It’s dark outside, there’s a rain storm hitting the windows, piano music to ease the anxiety, and there’s one sip of coffee left. After a full day’s work, she sits at the table and flicks through the pages where she left off the day prior. She finds her spot, takes her last sip, and begins the tedious task of scribbling notes at a hundred miles per second. She looks at her work thus far and sighs. She knows there’s more to be done before she sleeps.

What do you think? Should I have made it more exciting????? AHHHHHHHH, but I really adore how this came out. (ó?ò?)

Also, I’m in the process of editing the video tutorial!! It’ll be up as soon as it’s ready.

Taylor