Category Archives: AudioAssignments

a walk to work: sound effect story

An assignment everyone had to do this week was a Sound Effects Story. I wanted the story to tell a lot about the atmosphere which meant that I needed a lot of different sounds. So I decided on creating the story that most people experience during their day, the walk to work.

The process was fairly simple, just searching for sounds on Freesound and compiling them in a semi-organized way on my desktop. Then I uploaded each sound as it would come in on the final piece. This part wasn’t necessarily hard but just slow and annoying when things didn’t sound right together or some tracks were too loud in the scene. The worst though was when I realized I misread the instructions and it had to be under 90 seconds. This was of course when I had finished the original 2-minute and 28-second version that will forever sit on my laptop as just a memory now. But the cutting process was fairly simple just sad and then I exported the version you will all hear. I promise this one is under the time limit.

ds106radio Bumper

I am really not someone to put out work that they hate or aren’t confident in, but I really don’t think audio is for me. I have no idea what I’m doing, every option is like a different language, and I’m just confused and frustrated and posting this because I feel like I’ve tried everything and I’m tired and want to go to bed.

SO here is my ds106radio bumper:

Kudos to Dr. Oblivion for giving me a beautiful script, and then not being aware that I was going to keep his voice in . . . sorry old man, but you are a robot so I get to make the choice!

There is a lot that frustrated me with this. I used two audios: the synth sound and the bell? sound, both of which I downloaded from Freesound. I wanted to get this synthy-vibe, almost like the Stranger Things opening, but not entirely, just similar. I liked the mystery behind the synth audio, and I liked the idea that it was easily repeatable, and would be cool to fade out softly.

I thought the bell was cool to add for drama and emphasis, but I really don’t know what I was doing. I wanted the emphasis to be on the word “time” because I thought it sounded kind of creepy and weird and spooky, but I couldn’t figure out how to edit the actual audio of Dr. Oblivion saying “time” to continue that emphasis. I wanted the word to echo, but I couldn’t get that, or at least make it more emphasized.

I think I need to explore Audacity more, because this was so stressful and now I’m so afraid of the rest of the audio assignments . . . safe to say that I don’t think this is for me, but when I work tomorrow, I’ll give it my best shot.

If anyone has any specific tutorials they found useful for Audacity, I think I’d be your bestest friend if you guided me to them. 🙂

Radio Bumper – Weird and Wonderful

I had a lot of fun making my radio bumper. I wanted a sound that was scratchy. Like the transmission was not coming in clear. I wanted it to reflect the independence of the station itself. I loved that I could play around with the order of my phrases. I ended up putting them in a different order then I reordered them. I didn’t anticipate how much I was going to love playing with sound. I can see why people become sound engineers now.

It needed a picture, and my little evil brick is readily available and a good size.

I used sounds from freesound.org to go with my audio recording of my voice.

Sit Back and Relax

All the Relaxation is the name of the final assignment bank work I choose to do, which you can find here, All the Relaxation assignment. I have to make a video of soothing sounds for this assignment that may be played for more than ten hours. I decided to complete this project since I occasionally listen to these sounds when trying to work or when I can’t sleep at night. I used sounds of the ocean, birds chirping, wind chimes, a piano player, and a stream of water in this audio. All of these sounds, for me, are calming. All in all, what I really wanted from this assignment was to enjoy myself and be able to produce something that I would like listening to when I am relaxing. Listen to it here, and then comment about your thoughts!

Don’t Listen To This At Night – Spooky Edition

The next task I selected from the bank was titled “Spooky Season”. We were to find spooky sounds using Freesound and create a scary audio clip for this assignment. The assignment required choosing more than four sounds and adding them to an Audacity-like program. I started my scary audio with some eerie sounds, titled ghosts appear on the freesound tab. This reminds me of a horror movie, though not quite of a ghostly appearance. I next used the sound of something howling; I’m not sure if it’s the wind or an animal, but it makes me think of someone being outside by themselves late at night. Then, because who doesn’t find a spooky laugh creepy, I put a spooky laugh in there. The last two sounds I selected are related to monsters. I used the unsettling sound of a monster breathing heavily in the first one. My last audio was the sound of zombies because I used to get really scared of them when I watched The Walking Dead. Do you all think I had a successful spooky audio? I was rather pleased or should I say scared, with the outcome.

The assignment can be found here, Spooky Season Assignment.

Breaking News: Julius Lawrence Is Doing What??

Completing three assignment bank audio tasks was the next task for this week. The first one I choose is available at Breaking News Assignment. The instructions for this assignment were rather straightforward: create a breaking news story. I had to write something to say and use text-to-speech AI to read it. Since we had to include AI or Dr. Oblivion in at least two of our assignment bank assignments, I chose to use the character from my course for this assignment.

As seen in the video below, Julius is apparently considering stepping down at his highly coveted role as an Investment Banker at Goldman Sachs to pursue his true love, Basketball. As told in the reports, several NBA teams have reached out to Julius about him signing an NBA contract with their teams. As of now it seems like the Philadelphia Sixers are the frontrunners to land Julius, as he is a huge admirer of Joel Embiid and his basketball skills. Reportedly teams saw Youtube and Twitter highlights of Julius playing and realized he had all the same skills back in his college playing days at UVA, but seemed to be in better shape and more skilled than before. Julius had been quietly working on his basketball skills every moment he had free, along with running before work to keep in tip top shape. While he forewent going to the NBA when he was 22, he seemingly has regretted that decision and will now take his talents to the NBA. 

Making this video was lots of fun, especially because I had seen AI generated voiceover videos before, but was never able to create one myself. I always find enjoyment in creating a storyline for my course character, because he is whatever I want him to be. His story is exciting to me and I hope to continue with it throughout the rest of the semester. 

My First Radio Bumper Journey

This week’s assignments also included announcing the ds106 radio station and making a radio bumper that lasted between ten and thirty seconds. In between songs, this bumper would play to remind listeners that they are connected to ds106 radio! It was my first time using Audacity, but it was a fairly easy program to use to create my audio. I used Jad Abumrad’s phrases, “creativity” and “imagination,” when I was designing the bumper. Even though some of what I stated may sound cheesy, the main goal is to draw in listeners, so that’s what matters most. Since I assume that most of the listeners to the ds106 radio station are creative thinkers with an optimistic view on life, I chose pretty generic uplifting music for the background of my bumper. All in all, I had fun creating this bumper and I hope to have it played on ds106 radio. If you would want to listen to the radio bumper, here is the link.

Spooky Season

The final assignment that I chose to do for this weeks three audio assignments was to create a spooky sound clip consisting of at least 4 different sounds. As a result, I came up with a final product that you can listen to below which consists of 5 different sounds. The sounds are a scream, a woman laughing eerily, a person walking through the woods, a regular ghastly sound, and finally the roar of various monsters. The monster noises come in closer to the end because that is where the sound lightens up a little bit and there is only one other sound clip being played. The clip starts with a man screaming and then the woman starting to laugh like crazy so that it sounds like the woman is after the man. Then the ghastly forest sounds come into the picture and that is being played in the background as well as the woman continues laughing. Finally, the clip of a person walking through a spooky forest with ominous sounds is being played in the background as well. I enjoyed making this sound as it allowed me to toy with different sounds and see which sounds paired together well and which ones did not pair that well. Also, the monster noises were a last minute addition because I felt the end of the sound clip was a bit bare and by adding some more rustling and growling, it would make the sound scarier and it did. I was happy with the final product that I came up with and like stated before, enjoyed creating this piece. I think in the future I would try and experiment with actually regulating the sound clips, meaning like adding reverb or amplifying certain parts to make it more dramatic, but for now, I chose to keep it a little more simple and just do what was within my limits.

🎙️Mic Check 🎙️

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Behind the Creation:

Mic checks 1…2…1…2… is this thing on? This was a really fun assignment where I created a radio bumper for ds106. For this, I briefly listened to the radio station and instantly decided on a lofi inspired background audio to match the “vibe” of the radio channel. While I wanted to focus on matching the vibe of the radio station, I wanted to make my radio bumper unique. Something that was uniquely inspired by my experiences. I started off by recording the audio bit of my voice which took three tries and thenI headed over to free audio.com and instantly searched for key words like lofi, radio bumper, Mellow beats, outro, intro, and other things of that nature.

I found some hip hop type intro sounds to stack on top of each other and even took a snippet of someone else’s podcast intro and added that to the beginning of the audio. I then trimmed my voice recording and added the reverb sound effect to give it a radio feel. Then I adjusted the intro sounds accordingly and added some lofi beats to the background. I then added the outro bit which is like a power down sound and began to edit out unwanted sounds and arranging the snippets into ways that went together cohesively. After I was done I realized that something was missing. I found a bit on free audio which said “Well on this show did you expect anything else?” which I felt was a great touch to add right after my voice. Then it was radio ready so I uploaded it… also I can’t figure out how to allow downloads, so if you want to use it I’ll send you the file, just ask!

Anxiety on a Train ride

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Listen to my sound effect storytelling assignment below! For this, I tried to create the effect of having anxiety on a train ride and how overstimulating it can be for people with severe anxiety. Please enjoy and give me some tips down below!

Behind the creation:

I was really intimidated by this project and using a new audio editing service, but I still wanted the outcome to be something I could be proud of. I didn’t want something that sounded like it was put together in three or less seconds and then tossed to the side, and instead something that would put you in a dream-like state as we discussed earlier this week in the videos we watched. I first started by compiling a list of sounds that I would normally hear on a bus or on a train like bags rustling, the train moving, low chatter. Then I added some other sounds that would give you the since of being frightened or tense like the creepy voice, and the beating heart. I was actually hanging out with someone towards the end of my editing which admittedly was time consuming, and they said that even they got tense listening to it and compared my audio to some of the horror movie sounds. A problem that I ran into was the fact that the audios, even though they were placed properly to be cohesive, were way too long for this assignment with a cap of 90 seconds. So, I had to meticulously go through each audio and adjust it to fit right and cut out unnecessary bits. I am really proud of the product and all in all this took me about a hour and a half to complete!

Special note: I should have done the radio bumper first! This would have made this whole process easier and the bumper is less complicated! I guess you live and you learn!