Hello friends!

For my sound effects story I decided to use sounds to demonstrate my morning routine for taking care of my dog, Rubeus. It begins with an alarm clock and I made sure to include the sound of a dog yawning because Ruby does it every time she wakes up and it’s the cutest sound. The time limit made it a little tough to put everything in the there that I do for her before I leave for class but I put the basics, like feeding her and taking her outside. This assignment was definitely challenging, it took me awhile to get used to using Audacity. Once I figured out the program, I sorted through sounds on freesounds for a few hours, just to see what they had. I’m really please how this assignment turned out overall!

Make sure to check it out on SoundCloud!

Trying to think of a story to make with sound effects was hard, the first thing I thought of was waking up routine but that was listed as something not to do. I made this while eating dinner and I thought what better thing to do then a trip to the grocery store. This can be applied to the 80’s theme as well. I used this website https://freesound.org/ to find the sounds and all the sounds were free to download and easy to find. See if you can recognize the sounds and follow along with the store. For editing I used audacity.

I found Red Dawn on Netflix the other week. I had actually never seen it before, so, given our theme, I thought I’d check it out. The idea of Soviet proxy forces attacking a high school in the middle of nowhere, USA, is about as ludicrous as the thought that the couple from Dirty Dancing would lead the resistance, but that’s Cold War paranoia for you. I thought it might make a good sound effects story though. In my version, Godzilla shows up to save the day, after a fashion. He was hibernating through most of the 80s, but if WWIII woke him up, he’d be on our side.

Most of this came from Freesound:
School bell.wav https://freesound.org/people/13FPanska_Stranska_Michaela/sounds/378394/
Chalk on chalkboard.wav https://freesound.org/people/Liefdier101/sounds/366615/
Kids in classroom https://freesound.org/people/laserlife/sounds/361400/
helicopterPassage_28sec.wav https://freesound.org/people/lorenzosu/sounds/49481/
War sounds https://freesound.org/people/Dragout/sounds/150305/
Crowd in panic https://freesound.org/people/ienba/sounds/491405/
EarthQuake.mp3 https://freesound.org/people/Radical_Larry/sounds/450204/

I found the Godzilla screech on Youtube. I brought him into the story mainly because he has such an iconic sound. To put this together, I needed school sounds and combat sounds, hence the bell, voices, chalkboard, helicopter and gunfire. I thought I should have some sort of building collapsing sound to go with Godzilla. I couldn’t find one I liked so I settled on the earthquake. After downloading everything, I imported all of them into Audacity. I went through each track and renamed them so it would be easier for me to edit. Then I arranged them vertically, from first sound to last, again for ease of editing. The import left them all starting at the beginning, so I had to move sounds horizontally on the timeline. I changed the View to Zoom->Normal (ease of editing again), and to move a sound, I highlighted it, cut it and pasted it in later in the timelime. I clipped some sound effects shorter and added some fade in and fade out effects to others. Level-wise, they sounded balanced enough on playback. I noticed the chalkboard sounds lasted longer then the rest. They were drowned out by all the commotion, and up by the top of the stack so I didn’t see it. So I ended up with the copters and gunfire and screaming and screeching and when it all died down, there was still someone calmly writing on the chalkboard. It was good for a laugh, but not what I was going for so I cut it shorter. Here’s what my Audacity screen looked like:

From there I exported to mp3 and uploaded to Soundcloud. Audacity automatically mixed it down to two tracks.

It was fun to do and I think it came out well. As I wrote this up, I was quite aware that the reason it went so smoothly had a lot to do with familiarity with the program. All those little things I did for ease of editing saved time and frustration, but that came from previous struggles.

My everyday sound effects project! I used the BBC sound effects archive and Audacity to create.

In an attempt to get better at audio storytelling I dug deep to tell a story using only noises, instead of verbal communication. This one for me was by far the most difficult assignment of the week, but it ended up being fun once I started piecing it all together. With everything else being so positive this week, I wanted to add some doom and gloom to the mix, hence alien abduction. This man’s day takes a turn for the worst real quick. It is composed of a handful of different sounds pulled from various google searches, but I think it turned out pretty decent and sounds like it could go together normally. Although, I guess no one really knows what an alien abduction would sound like.

I created this soundscape in GarageBand. I got all the sound effects from http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk. I combined and cut five different sound effects to create a walk in the woods. Once I finished and liked it, I uploaded it into iTunes. Then I uploaded the iTunes file into SoundCloud.

#AudioAssignments #AudioAssignments70

This is a story I created by using sound effects. That’s right, NO WORDS!

I encourage you to listen to the SoundCloud post below, and try to figure out the story with your own imagination, before I tell you the actual story!

This is a story about a simple lumberjack who lives in a small house in the forest. He had started chopping down a tree a while ago, and he needed to finish his job. The sound effects story begins with his clock going off, alerting him to get to work. So, he gets up and walks to the kitchen. He opens up his cupboard to grab a cup of water. He pours the water and immediately begins gulping down the refreshment (in a gross manner). He’s all ready to go now! He walks to the front door, and as he’s opening his door he starts to hear nature calling out to him. He hears the birds very faintly as he closes the door and approaches his garden gate. He hears the birds singing to him, and the grass crunch as he walks through the forest, looking for his unfinished work. He finds the one tree he started to cut down and resumes his chopping. He swings his ax, with each chop entering further and further into the trunk of the tree. The tree gradually falls to the ground, and the story ends with the birds quietly singing.

I have a lot of sleepless nights and I love listening to the outdoors. The nights are a lot more quite where I live now than when I was in Pennsylvania. There were a lot of trains where I used to live and I love that sound (it’s nostalgic almost), but it makes for a less peaceful night.

Currently, I live in a really wooded area right now. I hated living there at first. It reminds me of the type of houses that are in classic 80s scary movies where people always die. I had nightmares all the time at first, but as I got used to it, I noticed the sounds at night are soothing and peaceful.

I wanted to tell a different story of the night. One filled with animals going about their lives, the winds rustling through the trees, and some morning birds singing to signify that it’s their turn to rest.

Here’s the expected dog photo to end this post!