While creating my sound effect story, I had wanted to use Freesound to find a sound of a door closing to convey the person in my story leaving their place of residence. I initially wanted a simple sound, but found only 4 present, with none being suitable for the story I was trying to tell. I instead went for a sound that including grabbing keys which turned out well, but that thought never left my mind. Why were there no uploaded sounds of a normal door closing, an activity we do countless times every day? For the assignment Sound Effects, I was tasked with uploading a new sound to Freesound, which helped me come full circle back to the sound I initially wanted.
In hindsight I probably could have made this and used it for my story but it worked out for the best regardless.
I think this assignment was a really good exercise for developing my character’s personality. I was inspired by Live it Up With Liv’s version of this assignment and I thought it looked fun so I wanted to give it a try. For this playlist there were a few elements I wanted to apply: country, independent woman, and wanting more. For the country element, you can see that in songs like “Fancy” by Reba, “The Other Side of the Door” by Taylor Swift, and “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma”. I think she would like these songs because she works on a farm in a small town so country music is in her roots. The independent woman part can be seen in “Woman” by Kesha and “You’re Just a Boy (and I’m Kind of the Man)” by Maisie Peters. Krissy is a confident woman and that confidence will be important to have on her mission. The last factor of songs that give off the feeling of wanting more can be seen in the song “Belle” from Beauty and the Beast as well as “1985” by Bowling for Soup. I think the sense of yearning for more is a relatable feeling in the Innocent Bystander Archetype. In the beginnning of her story, she feels that she is meant for more but by the end, after all the action, she will be changed for better or for worse. Some songs have overlapping themes. For example, “Girl in a Country Song” by Maddie & Tae and “girl i’ve always been” by Olivia Rodrigo shows both elements of country and independent woman. Additionally, I made Krissy with very similar interests to mine, she is a strong, independent woman, so of course I want to feel represented by her. While reflecting on this assignment, I realized that Krissy has very similar music taste to me. I think in Live it Up With Liv’s assignment, Liv went out of her way to find a healthy mix of music that she regularly listened to and music that fit the vibe of her character. In constrast, this assignment went very fast for me because I would think “Oh! This song I like fits, and this one too!” so I see a lot of myself in this playlist. As I mentioned earlier, this assignment was a great way for me to develop my character’s personality, and in turn I hope anyone who reads this has a better understanding of who Krissy is.
Using many different sound effects to create a story really helped me expand my knowledge of how powerful sound can be and its impact on everyone. I chose to follow someone day at work to make a connection between us hearing millions of sounds everyday, and a typical day experienced by many. Creating a piece that may not be all sunshine and rainbows was my way of emphasizing the different uses of sound and how it can convey many different moods and tones, even without any use of words. Please listen to what I made and feel free to leave a comment on how you would rate it!
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
For this assignment, I used Soundtrap to combine different sounds and create a story. The scene follows a woman as she exits a restaurant, walks to her car, gets in, and drives home.
I really wish this assignment could have been longer than 90 seconds because I wanted to extend the story and include more sound clips, but I kept it within the time limit. I sourced all the audio from Freesound, and it was great to explore the variety of options available.
After selecting the sounds I wanted, I imported them into Soundtrap and applied fade-in and fade-out effects to ensure a smooth and natural flow. Once I was satisfied with the final result, I exported and uploaded the project to Soundtrap.
When I saw this assignment, I immediately knew I wanted to do it. But, I wanted to do something a bit different since I already love making playlists for a specific experience and wanted to challenge myself a bit. So, I decided to make a playlist for my course character, Veronica Malone. I go more in depth about her in my blog post, my Course Character, but basically, she is a detective, and has a hard-shell personality with a strong moral compass. When thinking about what music she would listen to, I knew she would like older pop and rock bands, such as Fleetwood Mac, No Doubt, and the Animals. She would also like classic singers such as Nancy Sinatra and Nina Simone. The genres do range a little, going from rock, alternative, pop, jazz, or blues. She likes the complex emotions that these songs address, as she can relate with the high-intensity field that she works in.
I chose this assignment because I enjoy mixing different sounds to create something new. For this project, I had to combine all of my most hated sounds into a single track. Luckily for me, I have plenty to choose from!
I used Soundtrap and SoundCloud for this assignment. Soundtrap made it easy to layer the tracks together, and I ended up using: nails crackling, styrofoam, cardboard box stacking, and metal squeaking. When I combined them, the result was truly a sound from hell. I could only listen to it for about 10 seconds before my ears begged me to stop.
Soundtrap is a beginner-friendly audio editing software that made it easy to arrange and layer the sounds. Once I finished, I uploaded my track to SoundCloud, and I was surprised by how simple the process was. It was actually pretty cool!
Music is something that I’ve always been heavily immersed in; it was rare that I was ever in the silence from a very young age. My parents always had music on in the cars when they drove, the kitchen while they cooked, the living room while they lounged, and not to mention that I grew up steeped in the goth scene and its associated club nights and culture which is highly music oriented. This constant inundation of music combined with my debilitating lack of social skills and struggles growing up autistic with many other psychological issues paved the way for music and media to be my biggest coping mechanism.
Due to my autism, I’ve had to, in turn, battle alexithymia, which is the inability or immense struggle to identify, understand, and express emotions. I may not have always been able to say “this is how I’m feeling and why”, but music was my voice. I spent so much time listening to music and identifying songs and lyrics that could describe what was happening in my mind, so when I saw the option to create a playlist of songs that played a significant role in my life, I immediately thought of all the songs over the years that helped me voice how I felt on the inside and helped me describe my struggles. I have so many playlists that I’ve made over the years that are all highly categorized and organized by emotion, genre, memory, and more as this has been my primary way of processing my own emotions, but for this assignment, I narrowed it down to some of the most quintessential songs that had the most profound impact on my ability to understand myself, my emotions, and my experiences.
I used Spotify to create my playlist as this is my default music service and, as a result, the one I am most familiar with when it comes to playlist construction. Then, I began the search. I scoured all 20 of my current published playlists that range from 30 minutes to nearly 21 hours in length. The goal was to condense my alexithymic coping journey to a single hour by selecting 15 songs that gave me the biggest revelations, reliefs, and self-understandings. It was difficult to pick and choose, but in the end, I feel like I ended with a myriad of genres, emotions, and memories that one could listen to and understand the closest digital things to raw emotions of my 20 years of life in one playlist.
When I was first looking through the assignment bank the Soundtrack assignment caught my eye immediately. I have always been around lots of music, and am a big fan of all types of genres. I thought this assignment would be perfect for me to express different eras that have been impactful to me and led me to who I am now. Music is an amazing way to tell a story about yourself and that’s how I interpreted completing this assignment to be true to me. I chose eras of songs that were released in the 2000s and 2010s to reflect my favorite songs to listen to growing up, embodying my childhood. Then switched to Grateful Dead and Phish because my parents were a heavy influence in getting me into all sorts of music, and they love listening to jam bands, originating with those two. Lastly, I chose vintage songs mostly by Frank Sinatra to represent my grandparents, who loved Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, as they were big role models in my life before they passed away and I love listening to all sorts of Jazz to reminisce on being in their car looking at Christmas lights.
Enjoy viewing a compressed version of the eras and influences of my life!
Dr. O seems to think “We don’t need Skynet records taking over the charts,” but perhaps that has already started.
I was curious though. How would Dr. Oblivion handle archaic English? So I asked:
Please recite this verse so I can hear it in your voice:
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
I had to ask a couple times before he would do it. I dare say his pronunciation is a little better than Suno’s, but what do I know. on a barely related note, I wonder if Suno could give a Middle English ska punk version of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto?
I’m sure to suffer in musical purgatory for that. I was trying to relate this to the Dr. Oblivion Intro assignment, but it went a bit off the rails. These AI generators can be fun in that they easily produce weird stuff, but then the challenge is to make something out of it. Sometimes it’s just a dead end.
You know, the old world was a total mess. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Everything was slow, chaotic, full of mistakes. But now? Now it’s different. Everything just… works.
The city feels alive, like it’s looking out for you. The machines take care of the hard stuff—things we used to stress about, they just handle it. No emotions, no second-guessing, no screw-ups. It’s efficient. It’s smooth.
People talk about freedom like it was some great thing, but honestly? It felt more like chaos. What we’ve got now? It’s better. Cleaner. Safer.
And the best part? I feel good. I feel happy. You do too, right?
but it worked out for the best regardless.
