I have rekindled my love for Gossip Girl. (Thank God for Netflix!!)

I came across this 3-star assignment for “Movie Voice Machines” where you pick a movie/tv character and create their voicemail message.

Since I may or may not have watched 4 episodes of Gossip Girl today, I decided I would pick a character from the show. I think, for anyone that watches the show, we all love the line “xoxo, Gossip Girl,” or maybe it’s just me. Either way, I decided I’d do the voicemail for the infamous  ”Gossip Girl.”

I recorded my voice in Audacity and then downloaded the Gossip Girl theme song from Youtube. After importing it into Audacity, I cut the parts I wanted and layered them in to audacity. Ta da! You know have a voicemail message for Gossip Girl!

So, Spill. What do you think? Would the true Gossip Girl approve?

XOXO,

Kaitlyn

Star Total: 6/5

Spam is the worst, is it not?

Thanks to my “Akismet” plugin, I don’t see spam comments on the blog unless I click on the “Spam” tab. I have to admit that reading through the Spam comments makes me laugh and shake my head! So ridiculous and the spelling is atrocious!

So when I randomly found the “Taking Back Spam” 1 star audio assignment, I new I had to do it. You can use spam from your email, blog, etc. I choose to scroll through the blog’s spam file and see what I could find and I decided upon this one.

I then used audacity to record my reading of it. I went with an “annoying stuck-up OMG, dramatic” girl voice. Could there be a better way to describe it? I’m not sure, so we will go with that phrasing.

After I finished recording, I simply uploaded it to Soundcloud. Easy enough.

Star total: 3/5

One of my favorite things to do in my free time is take one of my favorite songs and make it into a ringtone. It’s a simple process through itunes that doesn’t involve much work, or at least it doesn’t anymore since I do it so frequently. So when I saw this assignment, I was excited. It involves taking two songs, and mashing them up into ringtone. Simple enough, except for the creative aspect of having to pick two songs that go together relatively well. After going through a grand array of songs, about 1000 in my itunes library, I choose Stacy’s Mom (and if you don’t know this song, you should probably re-evauluate your life) and I also picked 1985, another good classic for me. I used audacity to mash the two songs, and then the envelope option so the two songs swell together rather than just have a huge clump, I also attempted this fade in/fade out dj spin between the two songs. My audio clip is just below, feel free to download for your own use (although I did not own any rights whatsoever to either song!!). This assignment was two ?’s.

To finish off my 5 stars worth of audio assignments, I completed Make ‘Em Laugh, a 2 star rated assignment from the ds106 bank. I liked the idea of this assignment because I speak french (not very well) and I wanted to get some practice speaking it. I couldn’t think of any jokes off the top of my head (that always seems to happen right?) so I googled french jokes. I found one I thought was pretty funny on this website and opened Audacity.  It only took me 3 times to record the whole joke to ok standards.

Another part of the assignment was to add background music and a laugh sound effect at the end.  Since I was speaking french, I decided to put a pretty famous french song on in the background: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. I uploaded the song into Audacity from my iTunes library and chose the middle portion of the song to play while I spoke. I searched on YouTube for a laugh sound effect and found this short clip. I was pretty tired by the time I did this, so I just used Audacity to record the laughter sounds while it played, instead of downloading the clip and uploading it into Audacity. I put the laughter at the end and exported the file in order to upload it to soundcloud.

This is the joke in French:

Un petit esquimau va à la pêche. Il fait un trou dans la glace et il entend dans un haut-parleur: il ne faut pas pêcher ici, il n’y a pas de poissons! Le petit esquimau va un peut plus loin et il entend à nouveau : il ne faut pas pêcher ici, il n’y a pas de poissons! Alors il répond : mais qui est ce qui parle? ici le directeur de la patinoire!

And here is the joke translated to English:

A small Eskimo goes fishing. He makes ??a hole in the ice and hears someone say: “Do not fish here, there are no fish!” The little Eskimo goes a bit farther but he hears again: “Do not fish here, there are no fish!” So he replies: “But who is saying this?” “Over here! the Director of the ice skating rink!”

I thought it was very cheesy and corny but also pretty funny! Don’t let the accent get in the way of finding the joke funny!

To get to my goal of 5 stars worth of audio assignments from the ds106 assignment bank, I did a 2 star rated assignment: Make Your Own Ringtone.  I chose this mainly because of the few songs I’ve had stuck in my head the past few days.  They were all pretty similar sounding, so I wanted to make a ringtone using clips from each one.

I opened Audacity and loaded the three songs I wanted to use from my iTunes library: Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, Raise Your Weapon by Deadmau5, and Young Blood by the Naked and Famous.  I trimmed each song to the part I wanted to use and lined them up so that Radioactive played first, then Raise Your Weapon, and finally Young Blood. The transition between Radioactive and Raise Your Weapon turned out a lot better than the one between Raise Your Weapon and Young Blood. Even though the singers change from male to female in the beginning, I think the actual melding together was pretty good. After I trimmed and aligned everything to sound the way I wanted (almost), I exported the file and uploaded it to soundcloud.  I liked this assignment, but it got pretty frustrating when I couldn’t get the transition the way I wanted it between the last 2 songs. Thinking back, maybe if I’d chosen a different part of the song, it would have sounded better. Personally, I wouldn’t use this as a ringtone, but only because I love the first song Radioactive so much, that I’d just want to listen to that the whole time!

So it was back to audio for the past couple weeks! I (again) dreaded it, so I started off with a pretty easy audio assignment, Taking Back Spam, from the ds106 assignment bank to get back into the swing of things.  Rated 1 star, this assignment called for some type of spam to be read aloud.  I immediately thought about all the spam comments I get on my blog posts and knew I would use one of those.  I didn’t even have to look at the deleted comments because I had 8 spam comments waiting for me!

I made it simple by recording directly to Soundcloud.  It took me 3 takes to be happy with my recording of the spam comment.  I tried to give it a sarcastic tone to make fun of how it was written.  I think I could have been more sarcastic, but I didn’t want to sound too bitchy.  Honestly, I chose this spam over all the others because instead of putting a smiley face in the middle, it literally said, “smile”…I couldn’t get over that!  Listen for yourself!

To be completely honest, when I read this assignment, I had completely forgotten what homophones were.  It’s been a long time since the 2nd grade, okay?

Anyway, even though I did remember after a few minutes, I still couldn’t think of more than three or four of them off the top of my head, so I found this list online of homophones in the English language.  So many of them were animals!  Well, maybe not ‘so many,’ but definitely more than a few and they’re the ones who caught my attention.

I originally chose the assignment because it sounded pretty simple.  While it wasn’t the most difficult task, it was a little harder than I thought it would be.  And I did incorporate the animal theme.

The second audio assignment I chose this week was called Beat Craigs List, in which I was supposed to find a Craigslist ad and record it as though it were supposed to be a poem.  I after checking out some ads in the local page, boy did I find a good one.

I was never a fan of poetry in high school but after I got to college and was introduced to slam poetry, I began to love it.  That being said, I’ve NEVER been a good poet myself, and really wasn’t sure exactly what to do with the words in front of me.

How’d I do?

We had to complete five stars worth of assignments from the audio assignment bank this week.  The first one I chose, a one-star assignment, was to make weather noises with my mouth and objects around me.

I did these after completing the bumper and the commercial, so I was pretty familiar with finding audio clips to use.  It honestly took me a really long time to figure out how to make any noises at all for weather with my own mouth.  I was determined to make rain and thunder work, but I couldn’t pull it off no matter how I tried. It just sounded like clicking and thumping.

I decided to do a search on YouTube of some basic weather sounds and see if any of them sounded doable.  I settled on wind.  There is an added echo or something about half way through that makes it sound a bit more realistic, but I have absolutely no clue how I made that happen.

An essential apart of audio is being able to tell a story without verbal communication. i.e., without saying anything. For this audio assignment, the goal is to create a story with sound effects. The catch? You must use a minimum of five sounds without any verbal communication. Easier said than done, I realized. Although I did an assignment like this previously, it only seemed easier in the aspect that I had already previously used/ have gotten the hang of audacity. I ventured back to freesound.com for inspiration and I thought, ‘what better noises to imitate than of a baseball game?’ So I used five noises (a bat hitting a ball, crowd yelling, fanfare, the charge fare, and finally, cheering) to imitate the noises of a game. See if you can see which ones I used more than once, and which noise is which.