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.
For this assignment, I decided to venture into the realm of nonsense to come up with the most bizarre ad I could think of. Meet the Jetpack Jammies.
After painstakingly putting that vague vision into words, I used Voicemaker to create the narrator’s voice. I then used Audacity to create the old-timey radio effect on the voice and to speed up the disclaimer.
I got my music and the jetpack sound here. I used the same radio effect on both. Finally, I used Lexica to make the weird image you see now.
For my first audio assignment this week, I choose to do the Good Morning Message for The Village. I of course had a lot of fun making more ominous brainwashing content for this company and I hope other people do too!
It is always such a wonderful thing to hear a bright cheery voice delivering the Good Morning Message in The Village. Why don’t you bring some joy to the day and to your fellow Residents by creating and recording a wonderful message of community and cheer. Share your audio via Soundcloud and tag it appropriately.
Making this assignment was pretty simple since we’ve had time to get used to the various tools available.
First I used this text-to-speech tool to generate that cheery voice I knew this message needed. I then found that classic morning I needed music here. After getting both of those I did some quick editing using DaVinci Resolve’s Fairlight. And I know that that tool is generally used for far more complicated projects but I had been using it so much recently that it was where my cursor led me.
Finally, at the end of this assignment when I was about to upload it to SoundCloud, I felt that it was missing a photo for that final touch. So I generated one on Lexica and then edited the text on Photopea.
“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.“
I made a commercial fitting for my character, Hwei. He is attempting to sell AI powered prosthetic body augments with the promise of alleviating pain and enhancing performance. I think something like this is how Hwei would first introduce his inventions to the market, but not necessarily for monetary gain. This type of advertisement, if successful, would slowly introduce his inventions to society, and eventually making all of society accustom to getting this procedure done.
Most of the lines I chose were not sales tactics that you’d normally see in advertisements other than the intro that poses a question and then a solution. That is what makes Hwei’s commercial unique; no upselling, no monetary value mentioned. This also definitely isn’t from the 80’s but I took Professor Bond’s offer of bending assignments to meet our show, so I just did a regular commercial for this.
"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."
I bent this audio assignment a little bit to meet our needs for the podcast. I decided to go on freesound.org to find a suitable introduction song to our podcast. Actually, as we’re still in the process of splicing things together and deciding on which audio files would work for each scenario, I think that this may end up being a transition of some sort. There are a few other audio clips from the website that we have in mind but we won’t know for sure which ones to use until the rest of our show is structured.
I think this sound in particular has a very tech-y sound signature to it, and it’s almost stereotypically high tech with the synths and chords that go into it. We’ll see where this goes in our show, but I’m glad to have one piece of audio that would suit many aspects of our show.
Radio Bumpers are straight forward and a good marketing announcement for the ds106 station. I thought about what words should be conveyed in a bumper and how I might bring excitement to the listener. Have you ever pondered if listening to the radio is very different from reading a book? We want to take our minds to a different place, for peace and a little distraction from our own thoughts.
I wrote the text and had www.elevenlabs.com give it a voice. I then downloaded the mp3. On www.freesound.com, I found music that I like Freesound – Melody loop by DaveJf. I combined the two elements in layers on Premiere Pro and exported as a MP3 for www.soundcloud.com.
Behind the creation: For my second radio project I wanted to create an ad relating to Aggressive technologies as a a connection to the world the AI characters live in. I feel like it ties everything together with Marie’s story and shows that the movement is catching fire. For this, I used an AI male voice from Narakeet.com and a sad audio clip to keep it simple. I tried to create a commercial that created the same feelings as an SPCA commercial that evoked some type of emotion. I think this will be a great commercial to tie into our podcast. I had a problem spacing out the AI voice but it ended up working out ok. There is still room for improvement though!
I did a twist on the commercial assignment suggestion and made mine of a current AI product, instead of an 80’s product. The Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses are awesome! The lenses come in some color options, so that you can have sunglasses, clear or green lenses to wear inside. My character would order the sunglasses. She will be talking with Dr. Ravioli and wearing sunglasses on the moped.
To create the commercial, I did a voice from text at www.elevenlabs.com and downloaded the mp3. In Premiere Pro, I imported that file and a free clip form www.freesounds.com titled Echoes. In Soundcloud, I uploaded the mp3 commercial and added image from www.freepik.com.
Behind the creation: For the group project we were all tasked with creating a radio bumper so that we could pick the best 3 from the group and use it in our final podcast. I decided to create a pretty simple pop-style radio bumper with only three unlicensed sounds from freesound.com and my voiceover. I feel like the pop-style theme of the radio bumper goes along with our theme (Ai in pop culture) as well as the name. This took me about 30 minutes to start and finish to create and the only problem that I ran into was relearning how to cut and separate the audio clips in audacity. To combat this problem I simply cut and pasted to make everything go seamlessly. (Honestly, this course has me wanting to retake it over the summer so I have more time to focus on the tasks without my lab course loads.)
Today, I worked on a radio bumper for our radio show!
This might be the first time I’ve ever heard Dr. Oblivion sound a little enthusiastic! (I put the same prompt in over and over until he didn’t sound dead inside)
I use the CC Search and looked up “futuristic,” originally for inspiration, but then I found this which linked me to a Freesound audio that I ended up liking enough to use! It’s the only music I used, and I only really fiddled with fading in and fading out at the start, start of Oblivion’s message, end of Oblivion’s message, and the end of the bumper.
The only other thing I did was talk to Dr. Oblivion and convince him to give me a radio bumper and end it with the familiar phrase “ds106 for life!” This took a while, because sometimes he told me he couldn’t do it, other times he would, and other times he’d just spit out something that wasn’t quite what I wanted. I ended up using two different responses he had, both where I had to tweak a little to get the sort of message or tone that I wanted.
I put everything together in Audacity. It was pretty simple, but I wish I could get rid of the slight background noise for Dr. Oblivion. I also wish I could just make him speak with a little emotion . . . but I know, he’s literally an AI, of course he’s not gonna be full of emotion.
Not sure what else to add for this, but it’s what I’ve made!
Making a radio bumper is the second audio assignment I choose to complete this week in anticipation of the radio show the following week. It is crucial to have radio bumpers, as I discovered while listening to DS106 radio. I believe that in order to seamlessly transition back into the broadcast after the commercials, my group mates and I intend to incorporate our bumpers. Audacity was how I made my bumper. Check out the audio below, and share your thoughts with me! Next week, it will be presented on our radio show.
