This assignment required the telling of a story through only sound effects. This was, to me, the most daunting assignment yet, but ended up granting the most opportunity for creativity. I am resolving not to explain my story here (unless asked in the comments), as I’m largely in favor of listener interpretation. If you’re reading and want to comment, please don’t hesitate to share what you thought or heard.

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

Stars: 3.5 (not going towards the week’s total)

Process: To create this, I brainstormed for a bit and searched through freesound.org. I used a multitrack session in Adobe Audition to organize and mix these sounds, and individually edited the effects when clipping was necessary. Clipping was the only edit made, as I made all efforts to keep the sounds pure to their original creation.

One of the must-do assignments was to create a story using only sound effects.  It took some pondering to figure out what I wanted to do.  I ultimately decided to create a werewolf attack.  You see, every Saturday my friends and I play a role-playing game called Werewolf (similar to Mafia or Town of Salem), whereby each of us is a citizen in a village that has a werewolf infestation.  This was essentially my inspiration.  So I went to freesound.org to search for suitable sounds.  I included wolf howling, some dark ambiance, heavy breathing, running through grass, door slamming, banging, a crash, dogs growling, and heartbeat sound effects.  One of the growling dog pieces I used was actually a dog hyperventilating, which created this really throaty effect that fit the piece well.  Honestly the hardest part was arranging all of the sound snippets in Audacity to create the atmosphere I wanted.  It was essentially a lot of tinkering.  The final product is below.

The story I was trying to convey is a man running from werewolves.  He reaches his home and bars the door, only to have the werewolves tear through and (presumably) attack him.  It concludes with the sound of a heartbeat that eventually ends…

This is my sound effects story.

My thought process for this one was what would make the best story and I was going to do a break up scene but then I decided to show a women going about her daily routine before she got into a car crash.

Oh, sweet God. This took me forever. In my defense, I’ve never actually used Audacity before, and it took me ~30 minutes to figure out how to do things. This was actually pretty fun, aside from the constant stream of under-the-breath comments about recordings and putting things together and how the hell is this only 50 seconds long so far. 90 seconds seems really short objectively, but it was freaking ages in Audacity.

Figuring out where I wanted the story to go went really fast in the middle; however, the end was a pain in the butt. I got to 70 seconds and just drew a blank. I realized I had no idea how I wanted the story to end. Was it a horror story? A funny story? Once it dawned on me that I didn’t actually want to tell a horror story, the laughter seemed a natural next step. Getting the laughter to sound natural and not like I just spliced some in there? A HUGE amount of work, and I’m still not sure I got it all the way.

Just… whew. I personally rate it as 4 stars, but the actual count is 3 1/2. Too bad. Here are the 15 tracks I used in the story. Their preferred method of credit, if stated, is in parenthesis.

http://www.freesound.org/people/Reitanna/sounds/323702/

http://www.freesound.org/people/MadamVicious/sounds/238638/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Reitanna/sounds/235167/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Reitanna/sounds/252218/

http://www.freesound.org/people/sean.townsend/sounds/202917/

http://www.freesound.org/people/MWLANDI/sounds/85821/

http://www.freesound.org/people/mistorcaveman/sounds/154702/

http://www.freesound.org/people/tcrocker68/sounds/235586/

http://www.freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/346211/ (“Door Squeak, Normal, E.wav” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org)

http://www.freesound.org/people/tmkappelt/sounds/85687/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Reitanna/sounds/344004/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Jeanet_Henning/sounds/328892/

http://www.freesound.org/people/OwlStorm/sounds/151224/

http://www.freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/329599/ (“Footsteps, Dry Leaves, E.wav” by InspectorJ)

http://www.freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/360616/ (http://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/)

My third assignment was the sound effects story, which was worth 3.5 stars. I told a story of a typical morning at the office.

I found this assignment to be pretty simple, now that I have experimented with Audacity enough. It was a little frustrating at first trying to find a tutorial because most of the tutorials on the assignment webpage are no longer active, so I ended up just figuring it out for myself.

I got all of my sounds at freesounds.org. I didn’t have any ideas of what kind of story to tell, but one of the first sounds I saw on the website was a Keurig coffee maker brewing, so I took that sound and ran with it. My story tells a typical morning at the office, full of yawns and coffee and office small talk.

Meet Elizabeth, a 22 year-old female who happened to be a witness of an paranormal activity occurrence while walking in her neighborhood at night. No one knows where Elizabeth is now. Ambulance and police officers discovered her body 4 years after the incident. Do you know where she could be?

The sound effects I used in order were:

1.  A door knock

2. Footsteps and Puddles

3. Creepy sound monster

4. girl running panicking

5. Car crash

If you would like to create your own sound effects, visit here: (http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sound-effects-story/)

4.5 Stars Assignment

Length of audio: 44 seconds

Please click here for assignment page

This was a challenging assignment. I had to tell a story without words. So I thought of a scary night where a person gets into a haunted house. There he finds out that the house is possessed by a scary creature. He shouts and screams and fires at the scary creature.

The context of the story that I carved is that it is the last scene of a radio scary drama. At the end I have left the story open to speculation of the audience as they would be making predictions about what happens at the after the shot being fired. So till the next episode when the answers to unanswered questions will be given, the audience will be intact to the radio drama and tune in again to know the proceedings.

I downloaded 6 audio segments from Freesound. I have put the names of the audio segments in the sequence they occur in the radio drama scene that I produced.

1. Door knocks
2. Door handle sound
3. Door opening
4. Scary sound
5. Guy screaming
6. Shots fired

I imported all the audio segments to Audacity software.

Then I used the time shift tool, as can be seen in the image, to give a sequence to the drama scenes

I used the Gun Shot audio clip multiple times. Following image gives an overview of the final Audacity software panel that I used to export the scary audio drama in mp3 format.

Then I uploaded the drama scene to my Soundcloud account for a larger audience to listen to.

The post The scary night, with audio effects only appeared first on TaractarOnline.

For my first audio assignment, I created a story only using sound effects. Having some previous experience in iMovie, I was able to make the audio story there and then upload it to sound cloud. This assignment is listed as 4.5 stars.

You are out of town for the week on vacation in Florida and you have someone checking your house daily but you still feel uneasy. Something is powering you to go out and get a home security alarm so you are able to watch your house from afar. Its a couple nights into the vacation and you are waken up in the middle of the night from a notification. Its from the home security app. Your heart sinks. You open the app the play the recording of what has happened and you hear this. It sounds like some one opens and closes your front door. They walk across the hall into the living room, probably looking for valuables. It is just then that the alarm starts to go off. You can feel the panic of the burglar and you think that you can hear their heart beating out of their chest. They take off in a dead sprint and begin to race from the house into their car where they drive away faster than they arrived. The alarm was set to signal your neighbors and the police and both are currently at your house. You are on the first flight back home in the morning to make sure that everything is in place. You can rest easy tonight though, knowing that your alarm system has done its job.

Inspiration for this story line came from watching a little bit too much of the show Criminal Minds the past week. As I was browsing the listed audio clips and sound effects on iMovie, I started to piece together someone opening a door and then the alarm going off. Once I had that much, I was able to find a total of 7 audio clips that went together to form this story.

To put this assignment together, I used iMovie, iTunes, Sound Cloud, and websites for free sounds.

I started in iMovie and opened up a new movie. Instead of adding media to the file, I went to audio along the top menu bar in the app. There are already many useful sound effects listed in iMovie and ready to use.

Once I found clips that I wanted to use in iMovie, I dragged them down into my story board on the bottom half of the screen. You can drag any clip to any position in the story, shorten or lengthen the sound, raise or lower the volume, and fade the sound for any of these clips. All of these functions can be done when clicking on the clip. Dragging either end with shorten, dragging the horizontal bar will change volume level, and fading sound comes from clicking a position in the clip and dragging out.

Using the ds106 handbook, I was able to find sites that worked for me to find free sounds.

On most of the websites listed, there is a search bar that you can search specific words to browse the sound effects available. Once I found the one I wanted, I downloaded it on to my computer and it went right into iTunes.

Grabbing any sounds or song files you have in iTunes is an option on the left sidebar. Scroll until you find what you want to use and then drag down into the story board.

It is an option to export your file as audio only and save it to your computer as an MP3. Once saved, open and upload into Sound Cloud for final product.

Using the ds106 handbook, it was easy to find even more resources to make the process easier. Credit for running footsteps is from findsounds.com.

Here is a story that does not leave room for imagination. Stories of the Wild West are ones of bravery and courage this is what it might be like to be during the time of the Pony Express…

Please excesses the lack of no how in this one this is my first time trying  Audacity so far it took me two hours just to learn how to do this small clip that is  suppose to be 60 seconds. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a lot of time to take in-depth pictures but I was able to snag a few hopefully when I write I will accurately provide a description. This was a suggested Audio Assignment  (3 1/2 stars) !!!

So, the first thing I did was download Audacity to my mac book pro. This was simple all I did was follow the link the teacher had provided:  https://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/ . When I directed to the website I got a little freaked out because the website looks like a website that would download spam to a computer later I learned (from the Tutor) that most of the audio websites that are used for classes are just outdated. After downloading Audacity which was difficult because the prompt said to put the Audacity shortcut into the “Applications” folder on the computer and I had a hard time finding that. But, in the end I ended up finding the “Applications” folder by using the spyglass on my top bar (I call it finder but I am not sure what it is ). In addition to downloading Audacity I had to download a plug-in that would allow my files to be turned into MP3’S. The link to the download is “Here” this website look outdated to. Why don’t people bother to update their websites? I then tried to down load the third applications for sound recommend by our teacher and it looked like a terrible website so I decided then to go get help from  the tutoring center. The website by the way that I was trying to download was called FreeSound. With the tutor I created an account and then I had to activated the account using my yahoo email address. Using FreeSound is easy all you have to do to search for a song is to log into your account and then type what sound you want in the search box that is clearly marked. With instruction from the tutor I was able to go back and create my own work. Here are some of the steps you need to know to upload and create audio on Audacity:

1.  Open Audacity (by clicking the short cut, it will end up looking like this when you open it up)

2 . To Add a sound  go to the bar very top of the “Green” bar where their of options such as File, View ect. Select  “File” then “open” for the first sound.

3. To add a second sound go to the very top menu bar and select  File >Import> Audio (this I repeated several times)

(A screen shot I took during the process of making the audio)

Even though the process is simple once I got the sounds imported I had to cut them and make sure that when one track ended another began again. I had a hard time figuring out how to cut a section and put it exactly where is should be. I wish I could have learned if it was possible switch tracks because I spent a lot of time deleting tracks because I didn’t want them in that order. Needless to say I had to delete all the sound that I had and began again from scratch. The one thing that I would do different for this project if I could go back and redo it would be to make the sounds that I imported longer or have a longer story to tell. I think the most neat thing about this project is I got to see what sound looks like. When I was  looking for sound of FreeSound I got really good at being able to look at the sound on the main page with out hearing it and realizing if it was what I needed or not.

The story I wanted to tell using sounds is the story of the Wild West during the period of the Pony Express. I think it is important that the Pony Express gets remembered because its was America’s First postoffice route. Men (most likely) who participate in the route had to be brave because their was a lot of danger and their lives were at risk every time they got on a horse to ride. People tend to forget about the small events that have occurred in our history.