The second assignment I chose to do for the three audio assignments this week was to create a relaxing and soothing sound that one could fall asleep to, if they wanted. So, I went ahead and started browsing through some of the sounds available on freesound.org and tried to locate some calming sounds that I could put together to create one big audio clip. I wanted to include various sounds such as chimes, waterfalls, rainfall, animals, nature, etc. Luckily, I was able to get almost all of the sounds that I wanted to incorporate, into the final audio clip. As you will hear in the sound bite, I started off by taking all of the four sounds and having them play at the same time, overlapping one another. For the chimes, I decided that it was too overpowering for the rest of the sounds that were being used so I decided to just let those play every 10 seconds and then the time when they were not playing would be filled up by the remaining sounds that were being played. I chose to use the sounds of wind chimes, soft rainfall, a slow waterfall, as well as the chimes and chirps from birds in a rural countryside. I think all of these sounds blend in really well and allow the listener to try and pick apart the different sounds and try to decipher what is what. Also, none of the sounds are too overwhelming so the listener is not overstimulated by the same sound. Also, in the sound clip that contains the rural countryside there is a train horn that is being sounded way off in the distance which I personally really liked. I thought the addition of the train horn in the distance really added to the relaxing nature of the sound clip because the horn would sometimes be played when all of the other sound bites were coming down from their climax, so it would not be dead silence, rather a subtle horn that one could hear off in the distance and still be stimulated by the various sounds as they begin to climax once again. Also, the train horn was nowhere near too loud for this clip either and you could even hear the nature that was captured in tis clip over the train horn and really enjoyed the birds chirping while the horn was being sounded. I would say that my favorite sound clip used to create this entire piece would have to be the sound clip that had the train horn, soft wind rustling, and the birds chirping in the background because on its own, that could be a relaxing clip I could listen to all day. Take a listen to my final product, which you can listen to below.

One of the tasks for this week was to complete 3 audio assignments from the assignment bank apart from the sound effect story and the radio bumper. So, for my first assignment I decided to create a breaking new video with some text-to-speech video generation techniques with the addition of using a AI generated image to fit the theme of the class as well. The assignment also stated that we should include our course characters into the assignments as we go so I decided, why not give Xander a return the general public with a breaking news update. It has been a while since we got to check in with Xander and I am happy to report that he has been up to some big things recently. I could tell you but I could also just show you, take a quick look at this breaking news story that covered what Xander has been up to over the last couple of months.

As I am sure you all saw, Xander became the first human in the world to have an AI agent working simultaneously with his brain causing his brain power to almost double. This news is being released after Xander has been with the agent in his brain for about 5 weeks so he is well past his rehabilitation point and is onto full-blown performance testing now. As of recent, there have been no issues with his chip and he feels the same, however, he does say that every know and then he just gets a big rush of knowledge and that it is hard to explain. However, he constantly reinforces the fact that there have been zero negative side effects or consequences of this chip so far and stresses that to everyone who looks at him as a egotistical mastermind.

I really enjoyed creating this breaking news update because I have never done something like this before. It has always been with image generation but never with video generation and it cool to figure out how everything worked and what you could and could not do with a tool like this. The background image was an AI generated image, which actually took me a while to generate because the chatbot was not properly following my prompts and kept giving me random outputs that did not match my prompt but other than that, that part was pretty easy. I then found an professional looking avatar and added him into it so that he could act as my news anchor. Once I did that, I just needed to give it a short script to read as my text-to-speech requirement was being fulfilled while also finishing up the main chunk of the assignment.

P.S. Stay tuned, I think Xander has something big up his sleeve with another character in this class *wink wink*.