So this was a daunting assignment. I was overwhelmed mainly because there was no blunt tutorial on how to use Audacity and the steps that follow to make the assignment for the 5 sound story. But, using my resources, I looked at the DS106 Handbook and found out how to layer sounds and use Audacity in general. Once I watched that, I was able to put all of the clips together and tweak everything just the way I wanted.

I searched for sound effects on freesounds and saved those to a file. Once in Audacity, I imported all of the audio files into the program. I deleted portions of the clips, moved them around, and pieced everything together the way I wanted it.

Here’s how it ended up:

The story is that a woman is going to a concert. She’s walking down the street outside, and her heels are hitting the sidewalk, she opens the door to the concert and immediately she’s drawn into the noise of the crowd. She hears the soundcheck going on and then the roar and applause of the crowd as the performer takes the stage and begins to play.

This was an interesting assignment! While trying to find some tunes for my bumper, I tried a couple keywords related to “coffee,” I was looking for some smooth jazz or acoustic performance, but I realized that there was a wealth of clips related to the drink itself, so I hobbled together a handful (these: 1, 2, 3 and 4) and here’s what we have. It was kind of cool trying to “place” these activities by playing with the volume levels, what’s happening close to the audience and whats far. I kind of played it as if the listener was the person purchasing and drinking the coffee, I hope that comes through.

I created a story with 5 sounds I hope that you enjoy it took me a few days to even decide what I was going to do.

This one was pretty fun, making a short audio clip telling a story in nothing but sound effects. I got all these effects from freesounds. I didn’t know what I was going to do at first but then I remembered doing the 5card draw story telling thing which gave me the idea of making an audio version of that story. Finding the sounds that I liked for the story was difficult. Its like having what you want in your head but you can never quite figure out how to get it out into the world. I was pleased with the results though.

Like many of our ds106 assignments, I was very skeptical about the sound effect story assignment, but I ended up having a lot of fun with it! This assignment really made me feel so much more comfortable using audacity. I found all of my sound effects on freesound.org. I downloaded the sound effects in the order that I wanted to tell my story in. Then I loaded them and trimmed them down one by one using Audacity. I played around with it for a while until I had a final product I was happy with.

I thought forever about what to do my sound effect story about, I wanted to do something that involved a lot of sounds (obviously). I decided to create a story of someone’s typical morning. I believe I used about 10 different sound effects. My story begins with someone snoring, then an alarm going off. Next you can hear someone rolling out of bed and walking to the bathroom. They take a shower, then they pull back the shower curtain and flush the toilet. It amazes me how sound effects can tell a story. I think my view of digital storytelling has finally changed! IT IS SO FREAKING AWESOME!