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.

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.

Played From Another Room

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.

I had a lot of fun with the TV Product Placement Radio Ad because it combined two of my favorite things to do, watch silly sitcoms and ridiculous ads. These two feelings kinda crashed together into this assignment because of course somehow the best ads either come from the Super Bowl commercials or sitcoms. This assignment was perfect for me so that I finally had a use my infinite knowledge of sitcoms to a weird radio ad from a TV show. Listen to the genius of the Arrested Development writers and some slight editing work by me here.

TV and movies are full of product placement these days. Take a clip from a TV show or movie where they discuss a product (food, technology, movie, restaurant, etc. and turn it into a radio ad for that product.

TV Product Placement Radio Ad

I wanted this ad to feel less like a scene taken straight out of a show but more like an ad you could actually imagine on the radio one day where they try to be casual and just talk it up. I was first going to use a clip from 30 Rock because I’ve always loved the wit they use combined with just thinly veiled (it’s a glass wall) exhaustion over having to rely on such tactics to make money. But Arrested Development won me over because of just how silly and out of place their product placements are. So of course I had to use their Burger King scene that completely comes out of nowhere and adds nothing to the story but amusing and confusing feelings about Burger King. Should I like their food now that my favorite show says so? I guess I will!

The process of making this clip was a little more frustrating than I thought it would be but I’ve learned more about Audacity’s quirks and interesting tools so I guess a win is still a win. To start this assignment I found all the clips I wanted to use and downloaded them. Then I imported them into the all-powerful Audacity and cut them down until there were no awkward gaps, the scenes blended, and the volume was consistent. I exported it and was about to upload it to Soundcloud but first I gave it a good listen to check for any errors. It was all smooth sailing and I started thinking to myself, “Wow I might actually be good at this.” But then my small ego was immediately bruised by the impending sound of static on my audio. It hadn’t been there before when I was editing right? I checked in Audacity and the sound was clear as day. So I searched and searched forums, tutorials, and Audacity’s own manual and found nothing. To fix this I tried lowering the volume because of potential clipping, using the noise reduction tool in case there was a sound I missed somehow in the original clips, and changing the sample rate to help match my computer’s sound system. Nothing worked until as a last-ditch effort I exported it as an MP3 instead of an AIFF file. This option didn’t occur to me because it’s generally recommended that you export your file as either a WAV (Microsoft) or AIFF (MacBook) because they export with better-quality sound. But after making the audio export as an mp3. it was suddenly crisp and clean. So then I just uploaded it to Soundcloud and now it exists in the void. Success was achieved!

If anyone can solve my problem of the disappearing static I would be overjoyed but for now, I will live in perpetual fear of it returning.