Audio Assignments

Eat Your Hear Out Beethoven

Take an existing piece of mucis and and change the instrumentation. This could mean taking an a capella piece, and turning it into a piece for string quartet, or taking a beethoven piece and adapting it for electric guitar bass and drums. You could even take the alma matar and turn it into a bag pipes piece (im sure the school would love that). Once you’ve change up the piece, try playing it, blog about your choices and the thinking behind them, or post a recording on soundcloud.

3’s A Band

Using a Free Notation software (such as musescore) Create a piece of music using 3 instuments. The piece can be as long or as short as you would like, in any style but It must have 3 seperate and distinct instruments.

Create a ds106 radio bumper

Now that we have a #ds106 radio up and running creating a 15 to 30 second bumper for the station. What is a bumper? It is a short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(broadcasting)). So for ds106 it should certainly include “DS106 Radio” and some sort of message about the station with voice over music.

Sound Effects Story

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. Another example (by a UMW student): http://ds106.us/wp-content/audio/audio_story.mp3

Spooky Season

Within this assigment, you must find some spooky sounds and create a scary audio clip. Select more than four sounds and overlap them on a program like Audacity. You can use Freesound to select your sounds. Make them as spooky as possible. Good luck!

80’s Product Radio Commercial

Create a 30-45 second radio commercial for a product from the 80’s. Add in some background music and/or sound effects to make it sound like a real radio commercial.

Jamming with Dave

Someone was kind enough to make a “David Lee Roth – Running with the Devil Isolated Vocal Track” (You can download it with right-click, Save Linked Content As. It may be slightly different depending on your OS & browser) We can’t let that effort go to waste. Mix Diamond Dave’s vocalizations with another audio track – music, interview, conversation, whatever – to make something new and amusing.

There are a couple remixes of it out there already. Someone even made a soundboard out of it. What can you do with it? Do Dave proud.

Recreate a short movie using only sounds

Take one of your favorite movies or scene from a movie and tell the story using sound effects! There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects! Record your own sounds, use audacity, or use websites that have pre-recorded sounds for you to download to create your audio movie. Post your ‘audio movie’ and share it with the class to see if they can guess what movie you are describing!

Tell A Story

We’ve all had to create characters, now it is time to tell their stories. Tell a story pertaining to your character. This can be either from your character’s point of view or it can be told from the perspective of a narrator. Record yourself telling the story and add sound effects or music to the background for further detail and enhanced storytelling. Try to make the story between 2 to 5 minutes long. Be creative!

Sick beat

Make a sick beat, using whatever you can find on freesounds.org, and whatever you can record around you! I don’t care how long it is, just get groovy dood.