This is my sound effect story. Creating this took a bit of work, because I had to hunt down very specific sounds I had in mind and find the right ones. For example, I wanted to find ambient traffic and city sounds that you hear in the beginning and toward the end. I ended up using two sounds layered over each other, because either one sounded too incomplete without the other, and I added the sound of cars driving through puddles to make it seem like it just rained. I ended up using something like 12 tracks all together to tell the story. An extra layer of difficulty (see what I did there?) was in making this one spy-themed. Take a listen and put your own story together. Here is what I had in mind when making it:

Agent Roderick Rush is walking through the city after a rainstorm. He opens a door to an echoing room, maybe something like a warehouse or a building under construction. He pulls up a metal chair and starts writing on a piece of paper. He passes the paper across the table, and someone passes it back, then he crumples it up. Both people get up from their chairs. The other person, wearing heels, walks away, while Roderick goes up a set of stairs. He gets to a rooftop. You hear some clicking sounds, and this is where I wanted it to seem like he was setting up a silenced sniper rifle on a tripod (a la Jason Bourne). He then shoots twice, knocking out something glass both times, maybe windows or street lights. After that, he attaches some cables to himself and repels down the side of the building, and then walks into the night.

In some ways, making this spy-themed was a little easier than I expected, because the lack of dialogue helps add to the mystery. Two agents might not actually speak to each other because they think they’re being listened to, so I ran with that idea and added the part with the note on paper. This could have been my favorite assignment so far.

All of the sounds are from http://freesounds.org; I do not own them.

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I just witnessed a car crash yesterday so I decided to make a sound effects story about a car crash.

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For this assignment, I had to tell a story using only sound effects. This was not an easy task at all! I took all my sound clips from http://freesound.org. This site a huge library of sounds but it took me a long time to decide what “story” to tell. I am not a very creative person at all and in the end I went with telling the story of a normal day for me. I searched the sound library and picked my favorite of each one that I was looking for. Then, I used Audacity to combine them all into one long clip and finally, I uploaded the completed product to Soundcloud. It’s not a very interesting story but I think it at least meets all the requirements!

FYI-I work in a call center environment and each beep in the clip is another call coming through on my line.

This audio clip combines a pig oinking, walking up stairs, my car turning on, a pen writing, silverware clinking, a softball bat hitting balls, and snoring. I did a pig oinking because I have a pig and that’s the first thing I hear when I wake up. I used walking up stairs because I spend much of my time walking up stairs. I did my car dinging because when I’m not at school, that’s a normal part of my day. I did a pen writing because I go to class and take lots of notes every day.  I did silverware clinking because I hear that noise all the time in the dining hall. I did a softball bat hitting balls because I have softball practice every single day. And I did snoring because by the end of the day I’m wiped out!

For the sound effects story assignment, I used Audacity to create a short story using horror sound effects. Finding the sounds didn’t take too long, but layering them and timing them correctly was the hardest part. I chose the sound of rain, a door creaking, a door closing, a creaky house with echoes, ghostly whispers, a horror-movie type of music box track, a woman screaming, a gunshot, a baby crying, and the sound of an evil laugh. I knew I wanted to use these sounds, but at first I wasn’t sure how to organize them into a story. Basically, the way I wanted to tell it was the sound of someone walking into a haunted house where a murder had occurred. In a way, that was one part of the story, and the other “story,” the story of the murder that was being retold by the ghosts, was the sounds of the scream, the gunshot, the music box, the baby crying, the whispers, and the evil laughing. I used effects in Audacity like amplify, echo, change pitch, and reverb to make the sounds fit together better and not seem out of place.

This was quite challenging. I improvised for most of the sound effects by using my surroundings or finding what I needed on Youtube and holding it up to the microphone. It may not be the best quality and a morbid story (if you can tell what’s going on, but it turned out a lot better than I was expecting.

It was my first time really feeling comfortable with audacity, which is really saying something. It’s a really cool program, I just wish importing audio files was easier sometimes, but I found it more fun to improvise and make the sounds myself.

At sometime in their life someone has been told a fishing story that sounds too crazy to be true. My story here is just a little bit more tame. I used 6 sounds to create my story of someone going out fishing and catching a fish. The story consists of someone walking to their favorite spot, casting their line, reeling in a fish, hearing the splash on the surface, and then unhooking and dropping the fish back into the water. To make reel the audience into the outdoor scene I used a sound bit of some birds chirping with some outdoor ambience.

Overall this assignment was pretty easy. It take a little bit of searching and clever timing to get it just right. The sound files always need to be edited and tinkered with and that’s what made me spend a little bit more time on the assignment.

For this 3.5 point audio assignment, I was instructed to create a story with at least 5 sounds in under 90 seconds. My product is displayed below.

I first decided on the idea of a bride’s walk down the aisle of her wedding as my story, due to some vivid sounds immediately coming to my mind. I thought that the sound of church bells at the ending and romantic instrumental background music as she walked down the aisle in the beginning of the auditory story would be tonal obvious to the listener. I then tried to flesh out the beginning and ending of the story using my various samples.

I added an opening door effect to signal her entrance, followed by her heels clicking to the alter with soft background music. After a pause symbolizing vows, I used a subtle kissing sound to initiate an audience applause followed by church bells for a total of six sound effects.

I found this assignment interesting, although it was initially challenging to flesh out my concept and further perfect it using Audacity. Most notable was my struggle to find a subtle and not overly-exaggerated kissing sound, which was eventually an achievement for my story. I’d rank this assignment as average, due to the conceptual thought required.