In making this audio project, I decided to use Adobe Audition rather than Audacity as it provided me with a more professional interface. I figured I would learn how to use Adobe Audition as this is Audio Week for Ds106 and I wanted to get something out of this week… Anyway
This Audio Assignment can be found here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sound-effects-story/
The Story:
The setting of the sounds heard above is at the beach, around the time of sunset. My Character, Sterling James, enjoys taking small ventures by himself to natural landscapes in search of solace. He finds beauty in nature as it is one of the few things that has remained consistently peaceful within his life. This audio story depicts Sterling taking a step back from his life at the beach, beginning as he strolls down the boardwalk with his camera gear towards the ocean shore. He walks across the golden sand, stops and then sets up a tripod. He mounts his DSLR camera to the tripod and begins to focus it towards the shoreline. You hear his camera beeping and the rapid clicks from the shutter. Sterling finishes his time at the beach, packs up and then walks away…
The Process:
In making this audio project, I decided to use Adobe Audition rather than Audacity as it provided me with a more professional interface. I figured I would learn how to use Adobe Audition as this is Audio Week for Ds106 and I wanted to get something out of this week… Anyways, I found all of my 14 sounds at freesound.org (great site) and imported each individual sound into separate tracks (as seen below), where I was able to adjust the sound levels and effects accordingly.
I used two different sounds to form the background noise and simulate a beach setting. The first one was a gentle whisper of the ocean’s general movement and then the second that followed was the noise of waves crashing as you walked closer to the water. I also mixed two different walking noises on different textures to simulate Sterling transition from walking on wood, to walking on sand. The rest of the steps were pretty straightforward, so I just played around with various foley to render my story.
At first I thought that I would hate doing this assignment due to its complexity and time consumption, but I actually really enjoyed learning about the audio production environment and the potential it has to offer. Surprisingly, this was one of the most fun assignments yet and I am glad that this was required.
Here is my Sound Effects Story that is 3 1/2 points.
It was really fun to make but it was definitely harder than the radio bumper. I had to search for sounds on freesound.org and it was hard to find the exact sounds I wanted. I got all my sounds and began importing them into Audacity when the sounds would just appear at the front and I didn’t know how to move them to the places I wanted. One of my major things that aided me in understanding Audacity was YouTube tutorials. I found out how to move audio and how to make it flow together.
If I could go back, I would probably search for better audio of heavy breathing. I looked all throughout the website but I couldn’t find audio better than the one I ended up with. Also, I would try to find a way to make everything flow better. It started off really choppy but after some editing it’s good but still choppy.
The Story Behind the Sound
In my character dossier, I explain that my character time traveled into the past so, I wanted to show the process through sound. It starts of with a fight that Lukas and another character get into. He runs down the stairs and it shot back in time to a restaurant. The car horn and another “swooshing” noise are meant to be sounds that indicated his time travel. I tried to find other noises but I thought it would be interesting to use a noise similar to the “Jumper” film and have a city sound mixed with it.
Overall:
If I had a stronger knowledge of Audacity, I would probably add more things to make it longer with a better flow. If I had more time I would probably add more noises to the ending and switch out some sounds. I might want to experiment with sounds outside of freesound.org next time I do something like this. It was a lot of work but, it was fun to find sounds and mix them to make the time travel short audio story come to life.
Here it is. WARNING: GUN SHOT NOISE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TRACK.
Here are the sounds I used
Shocked Reactions
Escaping Downstairs
Silent Night
Jazz Atmosphere
SwooshMania
Gun Shot
Car Horn
Gasp After A Run
Here is my audio storytelling assignment with just sounds. It was supposed to be someone woken up from snoring with large noises, then a door slamming because they went to go see what it was, then they went walking and ended up finding a flood, hence the water flowing.
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sound-effects-story/ (3 1/2 stars)
One of our required assignments from the assignment bank this week was titled “Sound Effects Story.” And just as the title hints, we had to create a story using purely sound effects. The directions stated: “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.”
This assignment also had to be dedicated to our noir character that we have been working on for a few weeks now. If you don’t know who Cecilia is by now, then you have a lot of catching up to do!
I decided that I wanted my sound effects story to be about the “break in” at the Stanford’s house I wrote about two weeks ago. I won’t say much about it, or what I am visualizing. I want the effects to tell you the story, not me. Give it a listen, and tell me what you think!
[worth 3 1/2 stars]
This is probably the hardest assignment I have completed for this course thus far. I had no previous experience with sound editing so I spent the majority of my afternoon calling my computer various obscenities and falling asleep watching tutorials. My roommate even came into my bedroom at one point to check on me, because she “hadn’t heard me scream at my computer for a while” and she was “getting concerned.”
Although this project was tedious, time consuming, and ungodly frustrating I actually ended up quite enjoying it towards the end. It is a great deal like movie editing. Once you learn the program it can become quick paced and the options are endless.
Funny story, I actually got really creeped out at one point while I was adding in the “horror movie” soundtracks. I get spooked easily and around 8pm my roommate left the apartment to run to the grocery store. My apartment complex is already sketchy enough, but sitting here in the dark (my light switch was all the way across the room) and listening to the eerie violin music was giving me the creeps. Then, there is a huge knock on my front door and I swear to little baby jesus I must have jumped about two feet in the air while simultaneously screaming at the top of my lungs.
I screamed so loudly that my dogs ran and hid in my closet. My next reaction was to hide under my covers because you know, nothing can harm you under the protection of target brand cotton sheets. I may or may not have started crying, only because I totally got dust in my eye. The next thing I hear is my roommate calling my name from the front door. She was too much of a lazy ass to pull out her own keys to unlock the door, so she decided she better knock so I could come open it for her. Our friendship will never be the same. She needs to earn back my trust.
Anywayyys…I figure I should compile a list of all the different audio tracks I used, so when my professor is grading this he can truly appreciate how much time I put into this (*cough cough* 8 hours *cough cough*). Really I just want a pat on the shoulder and someone to give me a gold star for all my effort. Is that too much to ask?
Here is a list of all the tracks I used:
Sound of a champagne bottle popping
Sound of a person falling down wooden stairs
Sound of a woman’s muffled screaming
Sound of a male breathing heavily
Sound of heavy footsteps running up stairs
Sound of light footsteps running up stairs
Sound of a woman breathing heavily
Sound of door opening and closing
Sound of horror/suspense violins
After visualizing what I wanted my story to be, I created a freesound.org account and began collecting sound effects. I knew how I generally wanted the story to go, but I didn’t realize just how many sound effects it would take to make it sound good, let alone get my vision across. I felt as though without any of those effects I added some piece of the story would be missing. After finding all the effects and downloading them into itunes, I downloaded the Audacity application for my computer. It was recommended to us by our professors to use for sound editing. The program is simple enough, once you watch tutorials and figure out where you are going. It is not nearly as tedious as iMovie, but can have its moments.
After Audacity finished downloading I imported all my sounds into a new project. From there it was just a matter of arranging and timing each one specifically to fit the story. Once I was satisfied with the audio clip, I simply exported it to my desktop as a mp3 file and uploaded it to soundcloud.
This was a required audio assignment for this week and needed to be done from the point of view of our character. Here’s the link to this assignment:
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sound-effects-story/
This ended up being a lot more challenging than I thought. Not only in the sense of creating this with Audacity, but because I realized I haven’t given my character enough substance. I’m not very creative so this is all a big challenge for me.
Anyhow, here’s the short clip I put together. I’ll explain it below but wanted to give you the chance to listen to it first before I just tell you what it’s supposed to be.
So, since Lena is a veterinarian student, this sound clip it supposed to go through a short part of her day. In the clip, Lena walks in the door to be greeted by a dog bark. She then puts on her latex gloves in order to give the dog a shot. The dog whimpers during the shot. Once it’s over, Lena kisses the dog three times and then goes and gets a treat from the treat jar. She gives the dog the treat and it eats it right away. The dog then goes and gives Lena big slobbery kisses and she can’t help but laugh.
Although it was a very basic idea, it was still extremely difficult task to do. Definitely not going under my “best work” category, but it was cool to really start to understand Audacity and downloading sounds from http://www.freesound.org/
This was a really fun and difficult at times assignment to do. It was extremely easy to make a sound effect story for my character because not only down bond love scotch and being the best at everything, but he also drives a mustang boss gt500 and loves to party. It was allot of fun searching through all the different sound slips available but for some reason it was extremely difficult to find the right ones to fit for what I wanted; mainly in the car sound department. This actually took me about 30 minutes to find the right ones but in the end i should have just made them myself. This is for sure an assignment that i would not mind doing again.
George is in a fast paced life! Nothing you can do about it – once you are in you are innnnn!
To attempt to keep up with my character and noir his sound effects story begins with a thunderstorm, I just love a good thunderstorm. Then as you walk and take care of business through the city streets all of a sudden gun shots go off. You can’t hear where they are coming from, wait there they go again – another round. They are close and then another round and you begin to see what is going on. Man you are in hot water George just knows he will get blamed for this one if he is seen in the area.
All of a sudden you can hear ambulance sounds coming closer and closer people are down and someone must have called. I have to beat feet and get the hell out of dodge or I will get blamed for this one! I’m out of here . . .
This blog post is a response to the Audio Assignment titled “Sound Effects Story” where you have to tell a story with no verbal communication, only sound effects. This audio listens in to a quiet moment in my character’s, Shelley Layton’s life, after she returns home from teaching a class at the university she works for. Even though her life is filled with stressful moments, I wanted to capture one of the rarer peaceful times Shelley can enjoy, with her tea, her cat, and her reading documents relating to her current private detective case. I decided to create a calm atmosphere with sounds because I wanted to focus on the more normal aspects of Shelley’s life and while exciting moments in your life can be filled with an abundance of different things to listen to, the quiet moments can almost have more tension due to the absence of background noises.
In order to create this audio file, I downloaded 11 different sound clips from the website freesound.org. I then compiled the audio clips into the program Audacity, began to slide them into order using the Time Shift Tool, overlapped some of the sound clips, and then exported the audio as a wav. file. Lastly, I uploaded the final audio file into soundcloud, added a cover photo, and embedded it below into this blog post
Assignment Value: 3 1/2 stars
Sound Effect Story 3 1/2 Stars or 4 Stars?
I had a already created a normal night in for Sarah Mustard during the writing assignment week. So this time I decided I wanted to make Sarah’s life more interesting, after all, she is a private investigator. So I chose to make it a dark and stormy night, because it is always more ominous that way. I made it appear that she was having her usual night in, preparing dinner, saying hello to her cat, humming, putting on a kettle. I wanted to mislead the listener into thinking this was just another boring story about Sarah’s day, but then as the tea kettle sounds, someone bangs down the door, Sarah gasps, and the cat screams. At least this is how I had wanted it to sound.
I guess that was the challenge with this assignment. I knew exactly how I wanted my story to sound, but actually getting it to sound that way was another entity. Sometimes the sound would be off, or I wouldn’t be able to maneuver the sound quite right. But I think for my first sound project ever, I am proud of this story.
