I chose to do this assignment after I ran into copyright issues on Soundcloud

I knew it was possible, but I was having a hard time finding assignments to do that didn’t have to do with music. I kind of felt like I was going to run into copyright issues wherever I went, even with creative commons.

I spent 3 hours this weekend mashing up two eighties songs this weekend, but it’s okay, it’s my own fault.

So here I am. I decided to do something that I wouldn’t run into copyright issues that could still fit our theme, and I found the whistling assignment where I record myself whistling a song that everyone has to guess.

The biggest issue with this assignment was getting clear audio of my whistling without it sounding “windy.” I edited it the best that I can!

I’ll give you a hint: This assignment sticks to our theme this semester and isn’t anything difficult.

I simply recorded myself on Audacity for this one!

Can you guess it?

For today’s audio assignment, I did a Sound Effects Story. As the title says, it’s a quick story about a person who gets off work and heads home at night–simple as that. If you close your eyes and listen, what do you see?

I used a wide variety of sounds from https://freesound.org such as a keyboard typing, walking on a wooden floor, a locked door, heels walking on pavement, a quiet night in the city ambience, a car passing, a skateboard passing, bells, a door closing, and the sound of the neighbor’s TV traveling through the thin walls. I used these sounds and mixed them in GarageBand to create this sound effects story. I had to omit other sounds I wanted to use, since I just reached the 90-second limit! Overall, this assignment was fun, but it was a challenge to shorten it to 90 seconds.

This assignment was really difficult to figure out at first but I used a website called mix.dj. It gives you a huge variety of songs to chose from and you determine the fades, when the songs start, and su much more. I mixed Pursuit of Happiness and Roxanne and I think it turned out pretty cool. I couldn’t upload it anywhere except for twitter without paying for a subscription (and that is not an option), but the embedded tweet it above so check it out!! Once I finally figured it out it was really cool.

Me: I have to do this story where I have to create a short story from just sound clips.

Friend: Oh! You could do something like coming home, making dinner, showering…

Me:…the assignment says “make it something more interesting than waking up, taking a shower and eating breakfast “

Friend: Oh

Then, BOOM. It hits me. I love horror movies, so I’m going to make a horror movie short story with only sound effects.

In my head, I went through what happens in a typical horror story. There’s some weird noises that wakes someone up, then they get closer, and then they’re there (try saying that ten times fast) and they scare you.

I spent a lot of time browsing Free Sounds to find the right ones that I needed. I went back a few times as well while making my story when I realized something wasn’t working.

This assignment was a little easier than some of the other ones because of the way my story is formatted – it doesn’t require a lot of overlapping or volume changes like my other assignments have.

My vision for the story was that someone breaks in and the victim awakens to the sound. They then hear the person walk up the stairs and the victim tries to call 911 while starting to panic. The attacker makes their presence known, and the victim starts to scream.

Check it out and let me know what you think! It may be a good idea to turn down the volume.

The first assignment I saw in the assignment bank for this week was the 80’s product commercial where you do a radio commercial of a product from the 80’s. I thought this assignment was perfect because it fits into our theme and seemed relatively simple.

I decided to reach out to my mom and my aunt about what a good product would be since they both grew up in the 80’s. They both love the theme of this course so they are always looking for a way to be involved in what I’m doing.

Exhibit A:

After a couple of texts, my aunt brought up that people used to line up outside stores and get into physical fights for Cabbage Patch Dolls. I thought that this would be a really interesting way to go about the commercial.

So, that’s what I did. I centered it in the year 1983 because according to the internet, this is kind of when it really began. And they were really named the Cabbage Patch Riots.

It was easy to come up with the script if I set it around Christmas time because it demonstrates reasoning for the advertising.

I also watched some commercials for the CPK’s from the 80’s to get an idea of the product. CPK’s are still around so I wanted to make sure that my commercial fit how the dolls were in the 80’s. They could totally still be the same, but I have no idea if they are or not.

Give it a listen!

While searching through the assignment bank, I found this funny We Will Rock assignment where you recreate the famous beat for Queen’s We Will Rock You in a creative way.

There are so many ways that this could be done, but I wanted to have some fun with this one.

I thought that I could make it creative by getting my cats to meow to the beat. Not impossible, but hard.

I’ve been borrowing my boyfriend’s gaming headphones to record this week since it has a microphone on it. I decided to record on Audacity while one of my cats was in my work room and I, by accident, got audio of her “sniffing” the microphone and it was perfect. It then became the first two beats.

It’s pretty difficult to get my cats to meow on demand, and after some trying of teasing them with treats, I gave up. What I did instead is extract audio from an old video of my cats meowing during dinnertime and made it the final beat. (Her meow may sound like she’s in pain but she was just really anxious for some dinner, I promise)

I only repeated the beat twice. This was a relatively easy assignment in Audacity once I figured out how to use it. Plus, I was totally cracking up while doing this since the first part was a perfect accident.

Check it out!