AudioAssignments70 – Assignment Bank

5 Sound Story: Heart Attack

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Okay, this assignment started off to be a pain in my ass (excuse my language) but I managed to fight through it and learn to love Audacity. I’ve never used it before but had a BLAST making this clip. I started out with about fifteen different types of clips from Freesound, but narrowed my selection down and found the right ones to use for my clip. I managed to make it 1:30 and I think it sounds really really cool! Definitely a lot of tension but check it out!

When I first opened up Audacity, I had no idea what I was doing. I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to look up directions, so I played around with it until I was comfortable enough making my own clip. Then the fun began. I used Thunder on a loop, Heartbeat on a loop, a door opening, a creaking floor, and a crash for my five sound clips. I think that I used them all appropriately and actually got wrapped up in the assignment I lost track of time.

My main goal was to create something that made you sit on the edge of your seat. Being my first attempt at this, I believe that I most definitely succeeded. I’m going to Tweet this out for sure and try to get people to comment on this because I’m proud of what I made. It’s amazing what mashing a couple of audio clips can get you. Definitely something fun and exciting to play around with. I’ll be doing this a lot more with other clips in the near future.

If I had to choose, I would say that this was one of the best assignments that I’ve done so far this semester in this class. It was a lot of fun to be able to mix and match different clips and create something of my own based on what I thought sounded the best in each spot. I hope that you all enjoy the clip and comment for me please!

I was unaware that it was only supposed to be 60 seconds and instead, I made it 90 seconds. I hope that Professor Burtis lets this one slide! Just think of how much less intense it would be without those extra 30 seconds

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5 Sound Story: A Haunted House

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My 5 sound story includes 5 sounds that I found on the Freesound website. To make my 5 sound story I listened to a lot of different clips on Freesound and I decided on 5 that I liked the best and that went together like it would a story. To make this story I downloaded the software Audacity. I have actually used Audacity before taking this class. I used Audacity for making recordings for band class. I have only really done recordings on audacity so it was interesting for me to learn how to use Audacity for editing.

The first thing I did in audacity is to figure out the order of my sounds and how they connected the best. After figuring out the order of the sounds I then cut and paste the sounds into one track one right after the other. Now comes the real editing part, condensing the sound to fit 90 seconds or less and figuring out what should stay in the sound story and what should not. While editing my five sound story I took out parts that I felt were too repetitive and I kept the parts that I thought flowed the best with my story.

With this sound story I was trying to build up suspense to the final sound. My sound story starts out kind of eerie and spooky, starting to build up suspense. This sound story is called A Haunted House. I’ve never really been a fan of haunted houses or scary movie, but I like how they build up suspense. In my sound story I build up suspense using 5 different sound clips that I downloaded. I put them in a logical order of the suspense.

I found converting my audacity file to a .wav file was easy. You just export the .aud file to the .wav file. Afterwards I then uploaded my sound file to Soundcloud. I also made sure to enable downloads of my Soundcloud file.

Below is my embedded 5 sound story from Soundcloud. I tried to keep it at 90 seconds but my story is 91 seconds. I have never made a 5 sound audio story before, and I hope you enjoy it. Any comments or feedback would be much appreciated that will help me to improve for the next time.

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Drive Carful & Safe your Life

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The Sounds of the Infamous Chase

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I have been dreading doing these sound assignments all week. The thought of having to download and learn how to use new software made me cringe. I finally got the guts to take a hack at one of the projects. I’m so glad I did! It was so simple! I feel so silly for worrying about it all along. It just took a few downloads of sounds and uploading it onto Audacity and rearranging the sounds and Wahla I have a sound story. Of course my influence came from animals. I had a hard time trying to think of what 5 sounds I could use for this. I knew I wanted to use a dog barking, but wasn’t sure what story I could tell. Somehow, the thought of a dog chasing a cat came into my head. I used a dog sniffing out the cat, the cat meows, the dog barks, the cat hisses, and off they go. In the end, while they are running, I incorporated the angry cat (still the same clip as the hiss so it is still in the rule of 5 sounds) and another dog bark at the end to make it seem more realistic. Overall, It was extremely effort free and turned out pretty cool!

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A barn morning and a chipmunk’d Billy Idol

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Barn Morning
One last sound story, this is my attempt at painting a sound picture of a barn early in the morning, when the animals are just beginning to stir and wanting to be let out to graze.

Mony Mony Munkd
This stemmed from my desire to do something other than yet another sound story, and my like of Billy Idol’s song Mony Mony.

Credits to the following at freesound.org
acclivity
dobroide
axiyee

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Robbery Taking Place

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Robbery Sound files

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Sound Stories (tech difficulties)

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Our assignment was to create a story with no visuals, only sounds.

http://theblogwherefennecpostsstuff.umwblogs.org/files/2012/07/Night-Hunt.mp3

In my clip, a herd of elk are grazing at night, but are startled by a wolf howling in the distance and think it best to beat feet to somewhere else.

http://theblogwherefennecpostsstuff.umwblogs.org/files/2012/07/Snow-Dragon.mp3

I had no muse for this one, so I’ll have to make up for it with an awesome description. Picture a frozen forest held in the icy grip of a snow dragon. Making her way through a blizzard, she lands, surveying her territory. A quiet growl escapes her, and blue flames streak from her maw, freezing the ground into solid rock.

Credits to the following people at Freesound.org:

Gorgoroth6669

dobroide

Benboncan

Joan Barnette

imonacan

JoelAudio

cobratronik

Robinhood76

Anton

CGEffex

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A Ride Through the City: An Audio Story

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As a required audio assignment for DS106 (AKA: Camp Magic Macguffin) I had to create a story under 90 seconds that contained no verbal communication – just sounds. I started by looking up audio clips and just trying to brainstorm what I wanted to do. If there is one thing I love and can’t wait to do (hopefully soon!) is ride a motorcycle. So I decided to create a little story of someone (idealistically ME) zipping up there leather jacket, walking outside, starting their (MY) bike and going on a ride. As the ride continues city backgrounds are brought into the picture… horns, sirens, a helicopter above, people. I got my sounds from freesound.com an awesome website with a plethora of sounds and edited it all using Audacity. The software was easy to download, and a few questions submitted to Professor Google made using it very easy. I combined different sounds, faded them in and out as I please and finally got a 53 second story. I think for my first try my sounds transitioned and overlapped fairly smoothly (please give me feedback if you listen to it!).

The story fades out… the ride will continue on as the listener chooses. After finishing it, I closed my eyes and heard it. I realized then how personal it was to me. It is a reflection of something I hope to one day do, and my choice of city sounds (as oppose to say a countryside) also is a reflection of me. I was born and raised in the city ( the greatest one in the world by the way: New York), and this story just shows how much comfort and auditorial pleasure I get from the hustle and bustle of city sounds.

Take a listen and join me on my ride…

The following are links to the soundclips I used…

http://www.freesound.org/people/bdhammer/sounds/23083/

http://www.freesound.org/people/dobroide/sounds/30789/

http://www.freesound.org/people/sagetyrtle/sounds/36734/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Jewels/sounds/39848/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Zoom%20H4/sounds/97167/

http://www.freesound.org/people/jberkuta14/sounds/134900/

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Here comes the bride….

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In this Audio Assignment I had to create a story using only sounds. My first thought was a “do not drink and drive” type story. But I figured this was too cliche. I browsed through Free Sound and some of the first sounds to pop up were beach sounds. Ding Ding Ding, hello beach wedding! So I decided on a beach wedding as my story. My story would open up with the sounds of the ocean so that listeners would know that we were at the beach. Then you would hear footsteps, this is suppose to represent the bride walking towards the beginning of the isle. Chatter is heard which represents the guests of the wedding talking as they wait for the ceremony to start. Footsteps are heard again and then then bridal walk song breaks out.

I used 4 different sounds, 3 of which were found on Free Sound. This was the hardest of all my assignments. I had to upload all three of my sounds onto Audacity. Then I had to try and figure out how to cut certain segments of each soundbite out and paste it into a new sound stream. It took me awhile to get the cutting a pasting down. I was able to cut and paste all three of the sounds that I found on Free Sound into one sound stream. For the last sound, which was the bridal walk song, I just recorded that in from Youtube. I saved my new file and was finished.

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Sound Effects Story: Fly Fishin’

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“House fly” by YIM Hafiz, on Flickr

The ds106 Digital Storytelling course Sound Effects Story Audio Assignment 70 gave me an opportunity to devote some time developing greater familiarity with Audacity and the sound source website, FreeSound.org. While I normally would turn directly to Apple’s GarageBand for something like this, I wanted to see how layering and track editing worked in the open source sound editor.

I was pleased to be able to sort out the various tools without turning to documentation — although I didn’t sort out how to effect a pan from one channel to the other (left to right, in this instance). This will have to be a challenge for the next task. I also missed a simple way of naming the tracks to allow for their easy identification (although the waveforms do develop an identity after you’ve listened to them a few times). However, I did enjoy being able to toggle the interface for each track down to a very slim profile, as that made it easier to align two tracks that didn’t lie adjacent to one another in the stack. Cutting sections from one track was intuitive, and pasting sections into a newly created track worked just as expected.

The audio clips I used for this story are:
• Fly 1.wav
• Simulation of NASA (rocket) launch.wav
• 20061105Furnace.wav
• rocket report and scream.wav
• small_rocket_flybys_and_explosion.aif

While most were edited into the story pretty much in sequence, I did a fair amount of adjustments to the levels of each at various points using the envelope tool, and spent some time blending the Simulation of NASA (rocket) launch clip and the 20061105Furnace clip to get the rocket whine and engine launch. Each of the other three files was clipped, separated into sections, and in some instances (the fly) used multiple times to support the story.

The Andy Griffith Theme Song was sourced at: TelevisionTunes, with the intent of bracketing the story with an audio intro and outtro.

Image: House fly by YIM Hafiz on Flickr