Another digital media that I put together is an audio clip with sound effects, which I used to tell a scene of my story. I loosely followed the guidelines from the Sound Effect Story audio assignment prompt. I used around 9 or 10 sound effects and audio clips. This sound effect story is supposed to represent a scene where my two main characters go out of town and took a train ride to a restaurant for dinner.
How I made this audio clip:
To find the different sound effects, I went to freesound.org to download.
Once I gathered all of the sound effects, I went to the sound program, Audacity to import them in order.
To listen and edit one audio at a time, I muted the audio that I am not currently working on.
When the audio is muted, it will be gray, and the audio that is on will be blue.
For some of the audio like the restaurant ambiance, or the walking sound effects, I would either make it slowly fade out or fade in. To do this, I went to Effect – Fade Out/Fade In.
I also cut out parts that I did not want by highlighting the audio and deleting. Then I used Cut and Paste to move the audio to play after one another, so it does not overlap.
After I made all the edits I wanted and fixed minor details, I played the whole audio over once or twice.
When I am finished, I clicked File – Export – Export Audio.
To change the .wav audio file, I right clicked on the audio and clicked Encode Selected Audio Files. I left the Encoder as High-Quality, which changed the audio from .wav to a .m4a file. Then I uploaded it on SoundCloud, Ta- Da!
This assignment was actually really difficult for me. Figuring out Audacity was such a challenge. I tried many mediums to try to understand it. I tried to figure it out myself, watched youtube videos, and even asked some friends if they knew about it. I tried it and gave up, and then I was able to get the hang of it. The trouble I had was to get all of the tracks into one fluid track, instead of overlapping each other. This is what eventually made me give up. However, my boyfriend started to see my anger during the second attempt and he took over. He had never used Audacity before, and somehow he was able to figure it out after five minutes. Then he showed me how to do it, and from there it wasn’t a challenge anymore. The only difficulty from then on out was the options for the audio wouldn’t show up anymore, and I found that this happens when you pause the track instead of stopping it. From there, I finished my track and used my phone to record a voice memo off the track so that I could upload it to Soundcloud. Then I copied the link to it and embedded it into this post.
I chose to revolve this assignment around my character. We were supposed to not make it a typical morning routine, and I thought the perfect way to combat this was to make it about my secret agent. It still had some normal morning routine noises, but I was also able to take it a step further and to make it original. After I got the hang of it, I actually really enjoyed having to be creative with this assignment. It allowed me to be creative while also provided a learning experience for me. I have never experienced with any audio assignments before, so this was definitely a challenge, but it all paid off in the end.
This story was actually told a different way earlier this semester, in my post introducing my character Maria Segreti. I the post, I described using words. Writing, out of all the options, is definitely my medium, so I wanted to challenge myself to try and describe the story a different way.
If you want to read what story I’m describing, or at least trying to, you can go to the link above. Otherwise, here’s the gist of it: Maria is finishing up reading (and writing, though I don’t mention that in the text) when she gets a phone call. After the phone call, she packs up her backpack and leaves her office to go on another trip. While in the text she goes into her living room and then exits the building, time would not allow that to happen in this audio version, as well as her leaving the office being a nice ending point, as there aren’t sounds to describe “excitement” (except perhaps classical music, but not sounds like the ones I used) and room decor. In addition, its nice to keep this audio version telling the story of just one room. Perhaps another audio story could be told of the living room and the exit to the cab.
While an audio story shouldn’t have to be explained, this is my first audio stpry, and I have no idea how good it is, so I’ll explain it. The background throughout is rain. It starts off with writing sounds and page turning (her finishing up research, then a phone ring and indistinct voices (the phone call with Thiago). After, it goes to zipping sounds (her packing up her backpack), and then finally footsteps (her walking out of the room).
To tell this story, I used seven different sounds from Freesound.com, what I found to be a very useful and surprisingly easy to use. I actually had a lot of fun with this assignment. For all the sounds, I simply typed into the search bar what I wanted and surfed through the options until I found what I liked. Sometimes, I had to change words up or add words, like “rain” to “light rain”. After I found my sounds, I used Audacity to combine them together. I cut the sounds to the length I wanted them to be at and moved them around to the proper places. For moving them around, I had to get help from http://wikieducator.org/Using_Audacity/Moving_tracks since I had never done it before. In the text I don’t mention rain, but I wanted a nice background ambiance to ground the audio when other sounds come and go. I did have to increase the writing sounds for it to be heard clearly enough, as well as decrease the speed a bit so it was easier to tell what it was. For the footsteps at the end, I used a fading out effect so it sounded like the steps got farther away. For the flipping pages sound, talking sound and the backpack zipping sound, I had to cut them down a bit for time’s sake.
Horror movies. We’ve all seen them whether we wanted to or because or friends forced us. The exhilarating and anxious feeling you get in the build up to a scary moment in the movie is incomparable to another other feeling.
For this assignment, my job was to create a story using nothing but sound effects. I used a mix of five different sound effects to create an intense and haunted setting. From the Michael Myers theme to the creepy little girl, this piece is definitely one to get you antsy.
The Process
This assignment was one of the hardest assignments, but most fun, for me to complete. Having to regain my knowledge of audacity was a bit of a process, but I did enjoy it. Before I even started, I researched a ton of the different tools I know I am going to need to create the audio piece.
The first step I took to create my audio piece was to decide on a theme. I decided to go with a horror movie theme because I recently saw a trailer for the new Michael Myers movie coming soon. I also knew that the Michael Myers theme music is very frightening and a great theme to add to any scary piece.
The second step I took was to start converting the YouTube audio clips into MP3 files using ytmp3. I decided to go with five different audio clips, each scary in their own way. The first audio piece I chose was the Michael Myers theme music to be the background music to the other sounds. The second audio piece was of a person breathing scarily and heavily, as someone would in a scary movie. The third audio piece I chose was of a creepy little girl talking about scary things. The fourth audio clip I chose was of scary sounds coming from a haunted forest. Lastly, I chose to go with creepy swamp sounds with crickets and other scary animal sounds.
Next, I opened up Audacity and got to work. I started the process by importing the MP3 files into audacity. Once I imported them, I decided to crop the audio to around one minute and fifteen seconds because I wanted it to be relatively short. Next, I used the time shift tool to move the audio clips to there destined location. I put the Michael Myers theme, heavy breathing, forest sounds, and swamp sounds in the beginning to play simultaneously. The creepy girl sound bit comes in around the twenty two second mark, where all five clips run simultaneously.
After completing the audio piece, I exported the audio as an MP3 file onto my computer. This step was definitely the easiest since I precisely remember doing this multiple times in high school. Below you will find an image of how the audio pieces look in audacity.
Making the “sound effects story” was my favorite assignment of the week and I liked what I made made. I took audios from youtube, using https://keepvid.com/sites/download-youtube-video.html, I downloaded these youtube videos and then using audacity, I did a lot of editing to convey my story.
Anyways, here’s a little tutorial on how I edited my sound effects story for my final project, Long Awaiting.
There are a few things that I wasn’t able to show in the video. First, I had created a long list of all of the sounds I needed in the order I felt they needed to appear. Some things were taken out or I was unable to find good quality sounds which you’ll see with an “X” next to them.
99% of the sound effects heard are from FreeSound, but the girl humming along with the cashier and girl were voiced by myself. I definitely was not comfortable recording my voice but dang it, I had to get it done.
Overall, I think the story came out well and coincided well with my story. The only thing I couldn’t do was keep it under 90 seconds…whoops.
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.
Charlie McHue was a NASCAR driver with a passion for speed. This made him one of the best racers of his time, but was always a sensitive spot in his marriage. His wife, Angela, didn’t like his career; she thought it was dangerous and, quite frankly, stupid. She didn’t understand the rush he got from racing and the simultaneous calm that washed over him on the constant turn of the wheel. He felt at peace on the track, while she was nothing but a ball of nerves watching him from behind his pit stop.
During Charlie’s last race of the summer season, he was up against one of his greatest competitors. Charlie knew if he won this race that he may win so much money that he would never have to work again. He vowed to himself to win this race at all costs so that he could make his wife happy and stop racing for good.
Charlie and his opponent were neck and neck throughout the whole race, until the last lap. Charlie pulled ahead ever so slightly, and had just crossed the finish line when his tire popped and sent him spiraling off the track. His car flipped four times and burst into flames. The whole crowd called out along with Angela’s scream. Charlie survived the crash, but had severe burns and many fractured bones. The ambulances rushed to the center of the track where Charlie’s car laid. He was pinned under the car and paramedics couldn’t get him free for about seven minutes.
Charlie was rushed to surgery and Angela waited in the hospital hallway, alone. After fours hours of pacing and worrying and biting her nails, the doctor came out to update Angela. There was severe internal bleeding and Charlie didn’t make it through surgery.
Angela was stunned; almost too stunned to cry. Charlie was all she had in this world and now he was gone. He had left her his winnings, but she would have given anything to have him back, and even racing if he wanted, she just wanted him alive.
For this 3.5 star assignment I thought it would be an easy(ish) way to ease myself into creating audio assignments. I used the recommended website for free sound effects. I am also using Garageband, because that is what I have installed on my Mac already. I am not very well versed in Garageband, so I configured this recording kind of unconventionally. I was pleased with the final product, especially because it was my first time using Garageband to make this kind of media. I would have liked the transitions between sounds to be more smooth, but I hadn’t quite figured that out yet. I may be kicking myself later for not using Audacity.
First, I thought of the story I wanted to tell. I then opened Garageband and clicked the voice option.
That will take you to this screen.
I then went to freesound.org and registered my free account. From there, I searched the sounds that are listed below. There are links to the ones I ultimately chose.
Instead of importing and trimming each sound (I didn’t know how), I had both Garageband and freesound.org open in two separate windows. I started recording in Garageband (click the red circle button at the top) and then switched to freesound.org and played the recording from where I wanted it to start.
When you want to stop recording, click the red circle button again. This will stop recording sound. You then need to press the square stop button to stop the recording from moving forward.
Click and drag the vertical white line to determine where you want each new recording to start. Once all the recordings are done, you can trim each section individually by selecting each box and clicking and dragging the edge of it to be as long as you want. Then, choose file > save as and choose a name for your sound effect story.
Then upload to SoundCloud, or another audio sharing website. You can do this from Garageband by going to share > song to SoundCloud.
This is a little story that I put together with baseball related sound effects. I really loved this assignment and gave me some really good practice at layering sounds and manipulating tracks in Audacity. It actually gave me a lot of confidence for what I will be able to do in the future with that program, I really liked it. My biggest difficulty is recording my own audio, so being able to download sound clips was definitely nice and convenient. The only struggle I can forsee with that is that if I want a particular type of audio clip, it can be incredibly difficult to make or modify to your own personal specifications.
I think in terms of adding more to the clip, I could add the process of driving to and from the stadium, maybe buying something from a vendor, the sound of fireworks, which are often a post-game celebration, and even some more chants that are typical of American baseball.
I had previously created something that explains with photos how to create something in audacity. I didn’t know about the tutorial option to tag so I didn’t tag it but think this would help someone tremendously! Here is my previous post shared for a tutorial post!
This week I was given the challenge of creating my own short story with only sounds. No words were to be spoken. Luckily I was given the link to an awesome website with a lot of sound effect resources and you can find that resource here.
Next I had to brainstorm what I wanted to do for my short story.. then my dog barked. Suddenly I wanted to create a story around a dog bark. One of the sound effects that I always think about is walking so I wanted to incorporate that into my story plot as well. This is when the decision of “a walk in the park” came to mind, but I didn’t want it to end there. I wound up extending it to the walker getting back home after their walk!
Explaining the process of creating the story line will be a lot easier than it actually was. I was VERY intimidated by Audacity at first. But with a little practice it became A LOT easier than it originally was.
First I needed to upload my audio clips that I selected. This was done like so:
After I inserted all of my clips I was able to move them where I wanted them into the story sequence like so: (the little barbel with arrows on each side is what moves them.)
Once you get everything where you want it (you can have a lot more than 2 also) you can edit them. I became a HUGE fan of fade in and fade out. This really helped my transition from the sprinkler in the beginning and made it a lot easier on the ears (if you want to use the effects, make sure you swap back to your original cursor otherwise it will change the whole thing. But don’t worry because there is an undo button) Here are the effects I was able to play with:
After I did all of this, it was time to figure out how to save it. We were given another program to download so it was able to be converted to an MP3. If you want to download LAME yourself to convert audacity files, you can do so here.
After everything was saved, I uploaded it to my Soundcloud to share with everyone! I hope you all enjoy!
For this assignment I recommend using iMovie. iMovie’s timeline is easy to manipulate, and there are tons of great sound effects already native to the program.
Create a new project (choose movie, even though we’re just working with audio here).
Listen to the sounds they have, and start to piece together your story.
Drag the little orange boxes around to select segments of the sound clips, unless you want to use entire clips. I cut a few of these short so that they make sense in the story.
Keep selecting and dragging to your storyline until you’re satisfied.
Click ‘Share’ and ‘File,’ and save the .mp4 file to your computer.
Open the file up in Quicktime, and Export as Audio Only:
Now, you’re all set to upload your audio clip to the platform of your choice!
