For this assignment I had to tell a story using only sound effects. So I decided to tell the story of me coming home. It starts with a car door closing, someone walking to the door, fumbling with keys and unlocking the door. Then you hear the excitement of a dog who realizes that their person is home. You hear their excited bark followed by the dog treat container opening. Suddenly the dog isn’t excited barking, but now is begging for the cookie. Then as the dog eats their treat you hear foot steps until a computer is turned on. A password is typed in followed by a website and then finally you hear the Webkinz Spree music playing and the track is over. I think that it is pretty much exactly what it sounds like when I walk into my house, minus me telling Cali what a good girl she is for approximately seven minutes and forty eight seconds.

All sounds used, other than Webkinz Spree music, is from freesound.com.

On this week’s episode of Tales from Space!, our intrepid hero learns that not everything on unexplored worlds is friendly …

After listening to some samples, I came up with the idea of a space explorer meeting his fate on an uncharted world. I searched for sounds of a spacecraft landing, steps on a metal ladder and then footsteps in gravel, loading them into Audacity.

Next, I found an other-worldly roar, a bark and an attack, followed by a pig chewing. I used multiple tracks to overlap sounds, sometimes copying and pasting to get the “story” right. I found a male scream and put it between the attack and the chewing, then added some steam escape to the rocket ship. Some of the clips needed to fade out to prevent a sudden audible stop.

I trimmed, nudged and arranged everything until I had it where I wanted.

Finally, I decided it needed some into and outro music to give it a radio-drama feel. I put music at the head and tail of the project, which moved most of the clips that then had to be re-arranged.

For my sound effects assignment, I wanted to create an alien story.

The process was actually really difficult for me. I had found some cool sound effects online that I wanted to use but I could not figure out how to use them within Audacity. I wanted to add the effects to the effects that are already in Audacity but it kept opening up a separate editing page.

I decided to play around with Audacity’s effects and see what I could do. I had a lot of fun going through all of the different sounds and making them into my own specialized effects. After a bit of struggling, I figured out how to move around the clips and make them play after each other instead of during the others. I mainly used sounds within the Generate tab because they allowed for more editing. While I do think that I can get a handle on how to use Audacity, I wish it would be easier to navigate.

For this assignment, I tried recreating the T-Rex breakout scene from Jurassic Park. I downloaded the sound effect online and used Audacity for this assignment. It starts out in a rainy weather, you can hear the stomping and growling. Then the T-Rex breaks out from the enclosure, smashes a car, and gives out its iconic roar.

I did “Sound Effects Story” Audio assignment.

I downloaded some sound effects and edited them to make it a story…somewhat.

What do you think it is?

If you want to try it yourself and do way better than I did, you can find it here, http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sound-effects-story/

Below you will find the Storytelling assignment that I competed that includes 5 different sounds that portray a story. I used these sounds because I decided to incorporate my superhero, Safety Stan, into this assignment. 

While the sound clip is short, I think it portrays exactly what I was trying to do. The first sound you hear is a vibration, that is Safety Stan’s call to action from his phone ringing. Normally, it would be a louder sound, but Stan was in class, so he was unable to have his phone on ring. As he got up from his desk, you can hear the chairs squealing then he teleports to help someone in need. When he arrives you can hear the sound of traffic, then the beeping of the walk signal. After he helps the woman cross the street, she thanks him and he’s on his way.

Here’s the clip of Safety Stan’s adventure:

This 3.5 star assignment said to create a story using only sounds.

For this assignment, I decided to go with something easy to guess, but more emotional impact. All sounds came from freesound.org and then complied using audacity. The sounds were: music, crash, ambulance, flat line, church bells. My story is of a car crashing and someone in the crash dying. I tried to play on the emotions with the different sound lengths. The crash was super quick, but the ambulance track that followed was much slower. The story its is just over 50 seconds so I tried to pack as much feeling as possible. I feel like its not uncommon to hear about crashes and you can become desensitized to it, but with just sounds and now newscaster to drown out the horror, the story has a much bigger impact.

So, audio editing is a work in progress for me. I spent a lot of time working on each assignment, only to finally realize I wasn’t going to modern, electronic Mozart on my first try. My pieces aren’t going to sound like what I hear on the radio or at DJ event, if they did, I would already have very lucrative career in those fields. I accepted these were decent first drafts for someone who has zero experience with the medium. So, please enjoy! 

Song mashup 

Rookie mistake number one – after uploaded this to SoundCloud, it was taken down for copyright reasons. Truth is, I don;t know how other people did this assignment without breaching copyrights, other than it appears to can mix audio within the SoundCloud site? And I already spend a plethora of time learning a fraction of Audacity this week – no way this was getting redone by the end of the week. I’ve loaded it here as a file and apologize for that. 

Rookie mistake number two – pretty much everything else. I was able to learn to overlay, to fade in and out, to adjust amplification, tempo, and speed, but the tracks still didn’t blend together as seamlessly as I wanted. Adding to to the frustration, I could only reverse editing decisions one at a time, so if I decided that I didn’t like the way it sound because of a change I made three steps previous, they only way I knew to correct it was undo the last three steps and redo the two I wanted to keep. 

For your (somewhat) listening pleasure. I choose two contemporary songs from different genres with the same theme and almost identical names.  “Strip That Down” by Liam Payne and “Strip It Down” by Luke Bryan. 

Strip That Down

Sound Effect Story

This one, I;m actually quite proud of. I used ten different sound effects to create the story and was careful to include as much detail as I could. For instance, adding a high heel step or two between the bathroom stall closing and the sink turning on. the end result, in my opinion accurate depicts a panic attack in public.

This audio assignment was so interesting. Telling a story without words takes a lot of creativity! To complete this project I used the recommend freesound.org website to find some sound effects for my story. I then downloaded them all to my iTunes account. One I completed that I uploaded all my sound effects to garage band. I used garage band because I have had previous experience with it opposed to Audacity, which I looked at, but found it more difficult to use. Then once I inputted all of my sound effects into garage band I trimmed them to fit under the 90 second story limit! Here is my final sound effect story…Guess what my story is, and look and see if you are right at the bottom of my post!!

My story is that a little boy opened a magical door. The door opened to an enchanted forest full of birds chirping and magical creatures living happily. Then the Prince rode his horse in to meet the lost boy and make sure he was safe. Then a fairy flew out to meet them and cast a spell of protection over them because a horrific storm cast by the evil witch was coming straight for them. The fairy waved her wand and protected the whole enchanted forest from the thunder strikes of the witch. The story continues…