Sound Effects Story – “Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.”

Tutorial:

1. First I had to decide on what story I wanted to tell (relate-able, funny, dramatic, scary?)
2. I decided on scary so I went to freesound.org and typed in “scary” into the search bar to get some ideas
3. I found seven different sounds I wanted to use and therefore had to download (big yellow rectangle) each sound
4. I not only had to download each sound but had to save it to a file I knew I can find later to open in Audacity
5. I opened all seven sound effects in Audacity and listened to them so I could figure out which pieces I wanted to use and in what order
6. I opened up the sound I wanted first and kept the knocking while cutting the other sounds after it
7. Then I went to the next sound, went to “edit” to copy and paste this sound after the first one, repeating this until each sound effect was used and in the order I wanted
8. Then I was done but instead of just saving, I had to export it to somewhere I could find later and upload to SoundCloud

So to start off with: this was hard! Looking back it wasn’t hard as in 5 star difficulty, just hard to figure everything out in Audacity. I’m not sure how many times I yelled out, “WHY? WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?” In the end I felt great creating a story through a new media. I never would have even found Audacity if not for this class. Some things I had to figure out included how to copy and paste a sound, how to cut parts of a sound out I didn’t want and add a sound onto the first one, and exporting the audacity file to something I can use to upload to SoundCloud. Oh and this was my first upload on SoundCloud so that’s pretty cool!

As soon as I saw this assignment I knew I wanted to do a horror audio. This idea probably came to me because I had just listened to Ghost Stories by Radiolab the day before which included a plethora of haunting sound effects. What inspiration! So now I should probably tell you the story I was imaging for my audio clip. Looking back I could have added some more sound in, but what I imagined in my mind was more of an outline, so forgive me for my improv storytelling. Some of you may be horror movie buffs like me, but if not, you can probably hear all the cliches I mashed into just a few measly seconds. Here goes:

“I was quietly sitting in my room on a foggy night, knitting, when I abruptly heard a few knocks at the door. Being an older lady, I have found myself feeling quite impulsive and trusting. (I’ll die when my time comes). I peered at the clock to notice that it was almost midnight. I shrugged to myself thinking it was just the neighbor boy coming over to ask for some sugar for his cookies again. So I slowly made my way over to the door to take a quick glance through the peephole. Nothing. Total blackness. A complete and utter void. However, I recalled that the neighbor boy was rather short so I slowly creaked open the door to see a rather tall and menacing dark figure in a black robe. He slowly pointed at me and my knees shook. I tried to back away, run, anything, but all I could do was scream for my life. Or what was left of it. Because he quickly stabbed me with his scythe and I dropped to the floor with a thud. He then gathered me into his arms and we disappeared. All that was left was my empty apartment. Looking back I’m not sure why I screamed, for as scary as he seemed, he was just there to do his job. His career may be a gruesome one, but no one ever said Death liked his job. Did anyone even ask him? Does anyone ever say anything to him, other than just screaming and begging for their lives? No, looking back I am not sure why I screamed. I thought I was ready to go. ‘I’ll die when my time comes,’ I always say, so why is it that the very last breath I took was to scream? I guess in the end, we all fight to live.”

A man playing against the infamous Merrell Shale decides that it will be better to try his luck with a pistol after seeing his hand. I don’t think he knew what sort of place he was in, though, and the barkeep made short time of him.

This assignment was quite a bit of fun actually. I used all of my newly acquired audacity skills, and a few I acquired just for this, and put together a western audio story. First things first, I needed looped background and ambient sounds. I found some crickets chirping and country sounds that I had to cut down to remove traffic sounds. I collapsed the track into mono and found spots at the beginning and end where the wave crossed the zero line to clip the audio. Then, I fused several sections of it together over and over to make sure it was long enough for my whole story.
I repeated that process basically with my bar sounds, but I had to keep it in stereo and find places where both tracks crossed the zero line at the same time to splice those. It didn’t sounds the same in mono, it lost the feeling that you were surrounded by the sound. Then, I imported the following sounds which I had edited, amplification and cutting mostly, to suit my purposes: shuffling cards, cards being dealt, a chair sliding, a revolver cocking, a glass dropping, a punch, a body thudding on the ground, a body being drug from the bar, and saloon doors opening. I also created an assignment and made my own sound effect for the cards being throw on the table. I put them all together in that order and created an envelope for the bar sounds so that you could hear the crickets chirp and glass fall when the man who was angry about his hand pulled out his gun. After he is thrown out of the bar, people resume chatting and the shuffling starts over again. The interesting part of this assignment was that as I was putting it together, my ears were constantly telling me what was missing… what seemed out of place, what needed to be louder or quieter. It was as though, without my knowledge, they had become accustomed to listening to audio stories all along. I think it really highlighted the importance of audio in stories that employ it.

A few weeks ago I created a story around Riza, the Western character created for assignment, and this week I decided to add the audio which would accompany the story. You can read the full story below, or read this quick description for a recap. Riza’s dinner with her husband, Tate, is interrupted when their dog, Ringo, drops a few boxes and books. Riza walks over to the mess to find her missing wedding photo at the top of the mess.

Dingo Found It

I used Free Sound and Audacity to create this assignment. I created it by adding all the different sound effects in one audio clip. I used the effects: dog barking, walking on a wood floor, heavy breathing, falling books, and a loud female gasp.

This assignment is the mandatory sound effects story we were required to create. It ranks a 3 and 1/2 stars on the Audio Assignment Bank. Check it out below!

In this assignment the western character Andy the bank robber is robbing a bank in Colorado.  Despite the police chase he manages to make it away with the money and leaves everyone astonished!

This was a pretty difficult assignment, I had not used Audacity much before and I struggled in the beginning to get the sounds to cooperate.  Also I found that it wasn’t particularly easy to create the sounds in a manner that would make sense, finding the correct sounds was pretty difficult.

This is a short ‘story’ of a regular school day using only sound with some light editing in Audacity. I took sounds from freesound.org  and uploaded the complete file to soundcloud and now it’s here. I had wanted to do something like a battle, but that seemed like mostly white noise, especially without too many vocals shouting which defeats the purpose of a ‘sound effect story

For a reminder, my character, Mrs. Dean, is a homesteader’s wife. She works hard with her husband in their fields planting the crops, as well as caring for her kids and doing the housework. She’s quite the multi-tasker. So for this assignment, I wanted to capture the many sounds of her everyday life.

https://soundcloud.com/kelsdean-325898223/a-day-in-the-life-of-mrs-dean (For some reason it would not embed. After an hour of trying to embed it, I had to settle with inserting the link. #21stCenturyProbs)

Anyways….

Sound Number 1 is cooking: After a long day of work, she is preparing dinner for the family. You can hear the stirring and boiling and the clanks of the pots and pans.

Sound Number 2 is children playing: The kids are running around in the background playing and “being kids” before dinner. One even comes up and says “mama” while she’s preparing dinner.

Sound Number 3 is the dog barking: I added a pet to complete a typical family. I think it helps adds to her strength as being a caretaker and handling everything and everyone in the chaos.

Sound Number 4 is cropping: It shows the homesteader finishing up the rest of the days work in the field while his wife prepares dinner. You can hear the shovel digging up the dirt and cropping…sounds like hard work (no pun intended).

Sound Number 5 is the laundry blowing in the wind on the clothesline: Before dinner she put the laundry out on the line to dry. You can hear the sheets and clothes flapping in the wind outside.

All the sounds combine to capture everything going on in her world and how she acts as the calm in the chaos of family and work in these western times.

For my last assignment bank post of the week I had to do sound effects story. For this post we had to use Audacity and sounds from Freesound to tell a story less that 90 seconds of our western character. My story starts with the rooster on the ranch in the morning, followed by bob taking his horse out for a ride on the farm where he meets other animals along his way. This was pretty easy to do and the audio resource pages really helped. Longest part of this was to actually search for the sounds I wanted on Freesound. After downloading those, I uploaded them to Audacity and used the tools there to make it all mesh together.

So for this assignment, we had to create a story using ONLY sound effects. At first, I was a little worried about it, but once I started thinking about it, I had a pretty good time. My original idea was kind of a horror but I adapted it to fit into my character Marlene’s story. I used freesound to find all the effects I needed and Audacity to put everything together. I was pretty stoked when I realized how user-friendly Audacity is. I gathered about 8 sounds in total but only ended up using 6 and a small 7th. I had to play around with discovering how to get the tracks to play at different times but once I figured that out, it was pretty simple. I hope you guys enjoy! The story behind the sounds is below the recording!

As you listen to the story you’ll hear horses galloping and coming to a stop. Then the door to Marlene’s tavern opening and some background bar/tavern sounds. The footsteps continue and a guitar begins to play some music. Suddenly, you hear a woman scream and then a gunshot followed by footsteps. Can you guess what has happened in Marlene’s tavern?

This was the most frustrating assignment I’ve done because of the Audacity software. I couldn’t figure out to do things even after playing with the software for an hour. Also, the program started to mess with my computers’ functionality and make everything all slow. However, I was able to create a sound effect story after finally figuring out the features some more.

 In this sound effect story, you hear a horse walking towards something and a gunshot. After the gunshot is heard, you hear screams from the man shot and others around him. Then if you listen hard enough you hear the horse galloping away enough from the shooting, to a walking state.

This story relates to my character, because my created character is the sheriff’s son. In the audio clip, a crime of assault against peaceful Indians takes place. So my character and his father are going to have to track down the cowboy that committed this crime that you heard.

To conclude, I’m so happy that this assignment is over with and I hope to not have to use Audacity again.