Sound of Music

I did my radio bumper to one of my favorite songs by Bon Iver: Tower. His music, to me, is the perfect tunes to chill out with. Which led to this combination of layered recording. This was my first project in audacity. After a couple hours of tinkering I finally figured out how to  open it on my mac (security issues). Then,  I spent some time exploring how it works. Audacity is simple for the most part, however, there are still some parts i’ve yet to figure out (like cutting out of the track). Hope you enjoy the bumper!

Sound Story

This week i’ve been trying out my hand with some audio storytelling. I pulled together several sounds from http://www.freesound.org/ to tell a story. Using Audacity i moved, muted, and layered sounds. Check it out :

 

What does this story make you think of?

 

Who Left The Door Open? (sound effect story)


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by caterpiya

In the spirit of Doing the Work We Assign Our ds106 Students, I just made my own Sound Effect Story- the assignment as 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.

I’ve done this one twice before, one a story of keys another of something that might have happened while walking in the woods.

For this one I tried to do something that has an action and maybe an ambiguous ending. If you own a pet, its likely you have something that happened when someone left a door open. And I have my own tale of a dog that was lost… For anyone that has dealt with a lost dog, sorry. I hope it is the story (like mine) where he/she returns.

Here we go.

This was created in my usual audio tool, Audacity and using sounds from my favorite source, Freesound.org (yes you need to create an account to download, worth it). I had an idea for te sounds I needed, a door, sounds of a dog running, some ambient outdoor sounds, a person whistling, a dog dog barking- these are my sources:

The Towns or Suburbs track was useful as a background for its variable bits of wind, distance voices, vehicles to give a sense of being out doors. The dogs running track had people’s voices in the beginning which I deleted.

(click for full size image)

I played a bit with the other sounds. The whistle was short, so I copy pasted it to create several versions, and then used the shift pitch to make the last 3 sound a bit more frantic.

Likewise, I replicated the Far Dog sound and decreased the volume so it would sound farther away, and truncate the last bark followed by a bit of silence to end the story:

(click for full sized image)

And there you go! Make sure that door is closed, will ya?


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by fusion-of-horizons

Bumpin’ ds106 style

Again, I had been dreading the whole audio thing and AGAIN it was pretty simple. This took a little longer than the 5 sound story, but it wasn’t that hard. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to incorporate “ds106″ into my bumper. I finally found a sound that a past student uploaded onto freesounds.org that had “ds106″ in it. It had a computerized sound to it and for some reason made me think of a song I have been listening to a lot lately. It was hard to incorporate the two together, but I finally got a result I was satisfied with. I’m not overly enthralled with it or think it is the best thing ever, but I am still learning. Later in the week I might try to modify it a bit more. But for now, Enjoy!

The Sounds of the Infamous Chase

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!

Wedding Crashers GIF!! Quite the Experience

So making this GIF was pretty exciting, and at the same time kind of monotonous. Also, the first time I tried it the frames got screwed up and made a nightmare for me but here is the final product and I am pretty proud of it. This is a clip from Wedding Crashers before the game of touch football. I find it hilarious because Sack (guy in the GIF) is taking it so seriously. Anyways, hope you all enjoy my hard work!

GIF created by the one and only!!!

When I saw that we had to create a GIF I had to find out what exactly a GIF was.

Being the inquisitive person that I am I had to research and find out what it was before I could figure out how to create one.   From doing my research I found out that GIF stands for graphics interchange format.  I know I know this does not mean too much without a definition if you are new to digital world (trust me I am right there with you!)  In simple terms it’s an animated image.

I would have to say when I was presented with this assignment I put it on the back burner because I figured it would require too much of my time.  Lately I have not even found enough time to get more than 3 hours of sleep so I knew that in order for me to figure out how to create one and to enjoy this assignment I had to do it when I had nothing else scheduled and I am proud to present to you a GIF created by me from a scene from my favorite movie. (if you have not figured it out it’s the Temptations!!!!)

Oorah! Bootcamp Week 2

I have officially survived DS106 Bootcamp Week 2!! Alleluia!

Wow, what an experience. This week’s work took more time and effort. I already had a leg up on the first couple tasks i.e. I had already customized my blog, changed up my menus, set up the “cool” version of permalinks and installed my plugins. The next task was to change your theme. I chose not to, because I had already looked at the other themes and decided that my current one is what will work best for me (: I also had a lot of fun organizing my widgets, the tag cloud is OFFICIALLY my favorite concept of this class. I really enjoyed being able to design my blog to reflect me, my personality, and my content for this course. The assignments were definitely a step up from last week. I had to complete 3 Daily Creates, write up a blog post about Creative Commons, link my blog posts to my twitter, and learn how to make a GIF! The GIF assignment proved to be the hardest task of all..

Ta-Da!! My goodness what an adventure creating my first GIF! I chose to use a clip from Sweet Home Alabama, this movieis one of my all-time favorites. In this scene young Jake is protecting Melanie from touching a hot spot that was just struck by lightning

At first, the thought of creating a GIF was very stressful, I researched and downloaded many different types of software but nothing was giving me a good result. After trying for a couple hours to figure it out I finally decided to try the directions on this page. I found them to be VERY helpful. Step by step everything worked and my GIF turned out exactly how I wanted (: RIGHT HERE, you can find the published GIF with a summary all in one post (:

I really enjoyed the three daily creates I participated in this week, I decided to combine them into one post which you can find HERE(:

I really enjoyed being able to set-up my word-press to link to twitter to alert everyone when I posted something new

My reflection assignment on Creative Commons, can be found right here! (: This “research” assignment was very informative and interesting (:

To summarize this week: Stressful, labor intensive, and some enjoyment. I feel as if some things are really easy to do while other tasks are really hard to accomplish. For DS106, I think Bootcamp was a great experience. I learned so much and found that I am able to tackle more and more each day.

? Don’t touch that, it’s HOT!! ?

Ta-Da!! My goodness what an adventure creating my first GIF! I chose to use a clip from Sweet Home Alabama, this movie is one of my all-time favorites. In this scene young Jake is protecting Melanie from touching a hot spot that was just struck by lightning

At first, the thought of creating a GIF was very stressful, I researched and downloaded many different types of software but nothing was giving me a good result. After trying for a couple of hours to figure it out I finally decided to try the directions on this page. I found them to be VERY helpful. Step by step everything worked and my GIF turned out exactly how I wanted (:

Woman In Black

The Woman in Black, the 2012 version not the 1980′s one, was probably the worst movie I have ever seen. I shouldn’t have expected anything else with the horrible commercials advertising it, though I couldn’t find the video of the one I always saw (the audience reaction one which was basically just short clips from the movie that told you nothing and long scenes of people screaming in a movie theater and interview of them saying how scary it was) though the trailers I could find actually made it seem like a really good and scary movie. The scares were tacky and cheap, mostly going for more of a startle than an actual scare. The .gif above was inspired by these cheap scares which is basically the only scare they ever tried, the woman screaming at Harry Po-… I mean Arthur who was the main character. The story was under developed or at least not very well portrayed in this rendition, I haven’t seen the original so I can’t say that the story was bad in the 80′s version.The gif was actually quite an intimidating task for me, luckily my ever so handy boyfriend blogs all the time and makes gifs so he showed me how to do it. I think it captures the essence of the movie quite well. I think this movie could be a really creepy thing if it were actually happening to me but it was not a horror movie at all.

*This received my vote for Crazies post of the Semester so far on the fact that it was so frustrating to complete that I felt so accomplished after it was finally embedding correctly*