For this assignment I was tasked with creating a breaking news audio. I found a clip of an introduction of breaking news and added an AI text to speech of what I wanted to say. Hope you enjoy.
Category Archives: AudioAssignments
Radio Bumper
This is a catchy radio bumper that people will remember due to its beat. Eventually when people initially hear the beat they will know exactly what channel is playing.
Sound Effect Story – Walking a Dog
I had a difficult time thinking of something to do a story on with no words. It came down to crunch time Friday afternoon and I had no ideas. Hopefully you don’t find this too boring, but it is a rather peaceful walk. So, sit back and destress and enjoy the sounds of taking a dog out without leaving your seat.
I used sounds I found on Free sound and the following are a few of the ones I used.
Small stream in woods by CastleofSamples
footstepsB by bennstir
Jazz the dog Howl &Bark by delphinebrain
Footsteps walking through woods by noisyninja
Slam door by Soundsforhim
Dog barking in forest when jogger passend by by AtoMediaDesign
Single dog bark 1 by Crazymonke9
Cat Angry Hissing 01 by promete
Sound Effect Story
I made a short story about a swordsman who was ambushed by an archer. His horse is hit, causing him to fall. He deflects the archer’s arrows until he finds him and ends him.
Telling a Story with Sound👂
by Greta Hammen
My story is of a twenty-year-old man swimming in the pool at his parent’s house. There are some neighborhood dogs barking. Something has caused the police to be in the neighborhood and their sirens are notifying everyone. I did this arrangement in Premiere Pro using 3 soundtracks from https://freesounds.org.
Stream Sound Effects Story by Greta Hammen | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
hear your news from 100% real reporters here
Not everyone listens to the news. Those who do know that it’s either covering really important and often depressing issues or reports that are just so bizarre you wouldn’t believe they happened if not told alongside the photos and videos. Today, my mission was to make my own ridiculous breaking news report.
Create a breaking news story. This should be fake news. You should create a dialogue and have an AI read it using text to speech. There are several free programs. One possibility is Colossyan.com. Mix in a news jingle to make your story sound legit. You can find some jingles on freesound.org. Be sure to give credit if necessary.
Be creative, funny, or serious. The choice is yours. Just make it sound realistic.
To make this new report I first started by using the AI News Article Generator I found. I wanted this assignment to be almost entirely Ai made and that meant listening to whatever it decided to write for me. As a prompt, I used “crazy man does something dumb but illegal” to avoid being too specific and getting bad results. Luckily the first one I got was immediately so bizarre and entertaining though I would probably believe happened if I saw this report. You can listen to it here:
Next, I had to find a text-to-speech reader. Now I went through a lot of different sites and had issues with a lot of them. Either the entire tool was behind a paywall, you could only insert 200 characters this was 1820 characters so definitely a slow process, or the voices sounded too fake. But finally, I stumbled upon TTSMaker with free services and a large character limit I never hit. I did two voices for the report so listeners would know another person was the police officer speaking like an actual interview and then download the files. Then I had to find a jingle which I found a very normal one on Freesound and easily downloaded as well. I imported them to Audacity and quickly spliced the audio to make the masterpiece you see before you. Next, I wanted to make a quick news background, even though the assignment didn’t call for one I had to because it felt like people needed to see such a ridiculous event. So I used Stable Diffusion Online and after a few tries I finally prompted “man dressed in a chicken suit running away from police officers in a grocery store.” Finally, I put the image into Break Your Own News which added the news header and ticker used on the actual news. I wrote the ticker this time since it was so small and not a part of the original assignment. It reads, “Are you living with Ai? Find out from real reporters here.” Hope this ridiculous piece makes someone laugh because I sure did.
Breaking News
I decided to make some funny breaking news that (hopefully) will not happen for a very long time! I used Freesounds for the news theme and and AI text to speech for the reporter.
Poetry Reading
I chose “Fear and Fridays” by Zach Bryan as my poem. I always love listening to poems written by musicians since it is an extension of their art and shows their talent without hiding behind music. Johnny Cash and Zach Bryan are some of my favorites, so here is my reading of the poem and a “story” or lesson I think everyone can get out of it.
Auditory Hell
I went onto Freesounds and found dogs barking, glass breaking, nails on a chalkboard, and a record scratching to really emphasize how terrible sounds can be! Hope you don’t enjoy!
tennessee whiskey haunts andrea
This media assignment has two parts. First, edit a song to sound like it is playing from another room. The audio should sound muffled and the bass should be prominent. Here is an example of this effect and here is a tutorial on how to do this. The second part of this assignment is to write a weirdly specific description of your song. Here is an example of a description.
I did the Played From Another Room with Chris Stapleton’s Tennessee Whiskey and included my course character Andrea and her mortal enemy Georgia. You can listen to the song below while reading the description of the song being played in context and then read my walkthrough
Andrea stands outside her enemy’s office, dreading walking in and asking for help on a project. She would do anything to get out of this but her boss’ firm directions rebutted the idea which confirmed 2 things to Andrea. That her opponent might be starting to gain a foothold in the company and that Andrea needed to crush it as soon as possible. The longer she stands there the more tense she gets, only worsened by that song that keeps getting replayed again and again. Her foe’s music can be heard from behind the door, loud enough for Andrea to hear but quiet enough that no one else seems to, just like the scheming person behind the door. The sounds of a quiet melody being sung mix with the chatter in the building and the steps of Andrea’s coworkers as they pass by, some wave and make promises to meet up later at another event, while others spare her a sympathetic glance. At least some people aren’t fooled by this quiet menace. Finally, Andrea decides to bite the bullet and walk in with the confidence and superiority she was always graced with. She opens the door (skipping the knock to put her rival on edge and keep the upper hand) and braces herself for a ride from hell. “Georgia our boss sent me.”
I chose Tennessee Whiskey because I needed a song that made sense for Georgia to be playing. After looking at Wisconsin’s top songs charts I decided that this song would be perfect for Georgia. Especially during this time in their story when she’s had a hard couple of weeks dealing with Andrea with her legion of minions who listen to her every word, and she just needs a piece of her hometown with her.
To make the audio sound like it was coming from another room I watched the videos linked in the assignment about how it should sound and how to recreate those effects myself. Now I did have to figure out some terminology and use some slight guessing on some of the instructions as the video that teaches the effects is in another application and I’m just getting used to Audacity so I didn’t want to push it. But after doing a little bit of searching through the Audacity manual I was able to adjust the song. I primarily used the filter curve EQ effect and the distortion effect to achieve this sound like in the tutorial but then I added a little bit of reverb effect to really make the piece come together. Then I used the example in the assignment to write the description. Overall it was a learning process but definitely worth it.