During her many years of experimentation and trial and errors she was able to defy death. However, it came with the price  the human could not be trusted…..

Walking through the long grass while raining at night  Repasg open her door looking behind her back. She goes inside quick and the first thing she does is to go downstairs. Where her lover was waiting for her. He, Noah, an French soldier who died at her hand  while she was attending patients in the battle field. She was in love with him and she had spend so many years alone. She decided to try her new formula with him. She decide to let him live after death. However, the consequence were bad. He became a creature that had to be chain and concealed otherwise he would have eat her. She does not have the heart or the means to kill him for now. So she diced to kept him chained in her basement where she can at least look at him decay and talk to him even though he can answer back.

This assignment was to create a Sound Effect Story, only using sound now words. It is worth 3 1/2 Stars.

The story told through sounds of a pianist coming on stage to perform for many people before waking up from his dream.

I didn’t just want to put a bunch of random sounds and hope someone could just make something up to call it a story, so I went with the simple idea of someone having a dream and waking up.  In this case, I took the sound of someone walking onto a stage, an audience applauding him, clearing his throat (to play piano I guess…), playing the piano, and then abruptly waking up to the sound of a loud alarm clock.  I wanted the whole process to be represented so as to be convincing of the stories progression and changing it suddenly.  Twists are fun, right?

I chose to do my sound effect story of my morning routine after I wake up! It was pretty funny while making this, sense I couldn’t do any vocal sounds.

For this audio assignment I had to find 5 different sound effects online and put them together to make a story. I called my story “Revenge of the Dogs” because I based it off of the song “Who Let the Dogs Out?”. Before I give anything else away, here is my sound effect story:

I used the song “Who Let the Dogs Out?” at the beginning of the sound clip because it set the stage of the story and is what I based the entire story off of. I debated whether I wanted to use it or not since it had words but I determined that it was not “verbal communication” so it made the final cut in my story. I then added the barking dogs to show that the dogs were freed. I then found a sound clip of a man with an evil laugh and decided that he was the man who let the dogs out. I then decided that the dogs needed revenge on him since he was actually trying to steal the dogs so I found an angry growling dog. I added the sound clip to my story and doubled it and put them together to make it sound like a super angry dog. I then found an amazing sound clip of a guy screaming in a parking garage to create reverb. I separated his three screams and put the angry dog between them as if the dog kept attacking him. I enjoyed this assignment and loved that I could take it in any direction because when I began the assignment I wasn’t sure where it was gonna go but I love the end result.

Here is assignment number three called Sound Effects Story which is worth three and a half stars. I had to tell a story using only audio sounds, so this is a story on how to tune your guitar(E A  D G B and E Strings).

Here are the steps on how make this audio assignment:

1. Go to Week 4 of the Not Digital Truth Telling page.
2. I scrolled down to the section called Your First Audio Stories.
3. The second bullet under the section has a link called sound effect stories,which takes you to the assignment.
4. I then hooked a microphone up to my computer and opened the audio program called Studio One PreSonus
5. I hit the record button on the program and recorded myself tuning a guitar with my friends telling me which strings to strum.
6. I converted the file to MP3 and then downloaded it to soundcloud.

This assignment relieved some of my stress I had after assignment two. I got to learn how to kind of tune a guitar, maybe I will start learning how to play guitar after tonight. I like making audio videos I just wish my audacity program would work to make the assignments a little easier.

Sound Effects Story (3.5 Stars)

“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. “

I thought this was an exciting and challenging assignment for me to try. First I had to come up with a story that would make it clear what was happening just by using noise (probably the hardest part).

After already having downloaded Audacity and its plugins and signing up for freesounds.org for a different audio assignment, Having a Phone Conversation, I was ready to role.

Firstly, I went to freesounds.org and downloaded each sound that I thought I would need to tell my voiceless story. I downloaded a sound of feet walking on concrete, a dog panting, street sounds (birds and driving cars), tires screeching, a ding sound for a crosswalk single changing, and lastly a sound called “thump thump.” Can you tell what has already happened by me just naming the sounds? Probably. Maybe. I am not really sure.

In the below screenshot, you are able to see all of the downloaded sound clips in Audacity ready to start telling a story.

Once I had all of the files I needed in Audacity, began using the moving tool, which is found near the record button. It allowed me to move the audio files in their proper sequence, rather than all of them playing together at once.

I did allow the feet walking, dog panting, and street noises to all play together. The rest of the clips play one after another.

Below you are able to see that there is a gap in the first clip. I was able to do that by selecting a portion from the original clip and pasting it to a few seconds away. This indicates the man pausing, waiting for the crosswalk to change so he can continue walking.

Essentially the story I was going for was this: A man casually going for a walk down down the street with his dog. He stops at the crosswalk waiting for it to change so he can walk across the street. Well it does change as indicated by the slight (dink) in the story. He begins walking but a car running the red light didn’t see him and ends up hitting him. In my version, the dog was not injured what so ever and the man was badly bruised and that’s it.

*No one was harmed in the making of this story*

Hey everybody!

This is one of my audio assignments for this week. All of the audio assignments can be found here at the ds106 website. The point of this week was to familiarize ourselves with audio and how to create good stories with sound effects, music, speeches, and many other radio specific techniques. This particular assignment is one in which I had to use nothing but sound effects to create a story no longer than 60 seconds. The assignment details/tutorials are found here and the assignment is worth 3.5 stars.

The Story

This was by far my favorite audio assignment. Sounds are literally all around us and we hear so many things everyday. These very sounds can make us sad, or happy, or even afraid, and they enrich our daily lives while also giving us cues about our environment. I wanted to create a story in which the sounds cause a particular change in emotion- from calm and happy to dramatic. In this story, I also wanted to juxtapose sounds of nature and sounds of mankind because I believe the human world is becoming more detached from nature. This is not to say that humans are going to destroy the Earth and become robots, but it’s more a reflection of how we have become more disconnected. In the digital world, I think it is important to use audio that takes us to another place or excites us so the setting for my story is the zoo. A place where people meet nature separated by bars and enclosures. The story is of a person who is casually walking into a zoo. It is calm, there are birds in the background, at one point there are people laughing and enjoying themselves. Our protagonists stops and we hear the roar of an elephant and we imagine that the protagonist is taking the time to stand still and watch this force of nature. Our protagonist continues on, just a regular day at the zoo until he stops and hears a tiger’s frightening roar followed by people screaming and the story ending in chaos. This story is a good example of how quickly things can go wrong and how we often don’t see it coming. I think that this story is also a good example of how powerful sounds can be. When we hear people screaming we begin to worry as well, even if we can’t see or touch the threat. I have listened to many podcasts that use sounds to create dramatic emotions.

The Product

The Process

This audio assignment took the most time for me. The video below describes and explains the process with commentary and is a helpful guide to recreating this assignment. The first step was to go to free sound and search the sounds that I needed and this was the step that took the longest because I wanted to find good quality sounds. The choices for elephant and tiger sounds were few and far between but I managed to find one or two good ones. I downloaded all of the sounds and then opened up iMovie. One of the issues I ran into was that the tiger sound did not come standard as an MP3 file but rather an audacity file. This is an easy thing to fix, simply open with file with audacity and “export” it as an MP3.  iMovie is a very simple tool to use and all I had to do was select parts of the sound clips I wanted and drag them to the bottom where the movie is built. iMovie has a special spot for audio and I just placed my audio in the order that I wanted the story to go. One can easily crop their audio track by clicking on the ends of the clip and shortening it by dragging it back. Once I was satisfied with my product, I exported as an audio MP3 file and saved it to my desktop. After that I uploaded to SoundCloud and copied it into the blog.

My sound effect story is of a convenience store robbery and murder. A man parks his car, opens the door, walks to the cash register, pumps his shotgun, the cash register opens, he then shoots the cash clerk, walks out the door, and drives away. On YouTube I googled each sound and converted it to a MP3 file and then downloaded each sound into iTunes. Here is the link of this assignment on my SoundCloud and twitter

These are a bunch of sound bites clipped together to make a story assignment. This person decides to take a stroll through a vineyard to check the grapes and listen to the birds. When he gets back inside he opens a nice bottle of vino and takes a load off. I meant to keep it under 60 seconds but I think that I got a little carried away.

I know that it was recommended to use Audacity for the creation of this file but I actually thought that the interface on Garageband was more friendly. The area in where it let me down was timing. I was reading the beats as seconds and I went about another minute over budget. I had a really easy time manipulating the content of this audio file.

All in all, I used 14 separate sound bites and a couple of those were used multiple times. I wanted to give the sense that this person lives in a beautiful natural setting. He walks out his door and into a vineyard right away. The brief plucks (may seem like static at first) are grapes being pulled off the vine. He makes his way back inside when he goes straight for the wine rack then walks right back to the couch where he pours a glass. He proceeds to fix the cushion, sit down, roll a cigarette and light it.

Please let me know what you think in the comments section below! The image used on the soundcloud clip was taken from wikimedia and labeled for reuse on Google Images.