For this assignment I created a spooky audio clip using 5 different unique sounds. You can hear different elements such as a creaking door and suspensefully background audio. Hope you enjoy!
Category Archives: AudioAssignments2613
Spooky Season – Audio Assignment
Did you get the chills?
The prompt for this Audio Assignment was,
“Within this assigment, you must find some spooky sounds and create a scary audio clip. Select more than four sounds and overlap them on a program like Audacity. You can use Freesound to select your sounds. Make them as spooky as possible. Good luck!“
So, obviously, I did just that.
I wanted to keep it kind of anonymous, let your brain fill in the story. I got all of my sounds from Freesound, as always (what a good source of sounds).
I wanted a white noise sound in the background that would stay the entire time, something eerie and creepy . . . weird, even. It’s there to build ambience, to set the mood rather than setting the scene. To set the scene, I added wind noises to create an environment. I also added footsteps to create texture, making sure the audio I found was on concrete or at least something hard, because I imagined it as such. Maybe it’s an alleyway, but I think it’s just an abandoned road, because the wind isn’t bouncing off of anything and the ground is hard.
One little thing to paint the story with the footsteps is that I paired them with the eerie environment. I stopped them, paused them and cut out the audio there abruptly, as our main character pauses after hearing the baby laugh. Another little thing, I kept the main character breathing shakily throughout it, but upon hearing the laugh, she not only stops walking, but she stops breathing, holding her breath.
She keeps going after the laugh stops, catching her breath again, and it’s just her breathing with the white noise, wind, and her footsteps, until there is the distant, barely there sound of a child singing. Only this time, she does not stop, and she doesn’t run ahead, because just after the child sings, there are two sounds that play out that create tension, one like a catherdral, and one almost like a jumpscare. But you keep hearing her footsteps and you keep hearing her breathe: she’s still going.
And then it ends.
What happens next? I don’t know, maybe she starts running as the child laugh gets closer. I was originally going to end it with a “boo!” from a child, like it jumpscares her and that’s the end, but I couldn’t find a good enough audio for that, so the end is ambiguous.
This was so much fun . . . I don’t like creepy things, but I play horror games and if there’s one thing that is so important about horror, it’s sound. It’s the ambience. It’s the scene that you make through audio to fuel visuals in your brain, to let your brain freak you out more and more over the littlest of sounds. It’s so so cool.
Also, I believe this was a student from a few years back, but I listened to this as inspiration (I was going through the assignments) and I just think they did a really good job and that was really cool, so I just wanted to promo it!
I’d be interested to see if anyone from this semester does this assignment . . . I wanna see all the creepy scenes we can build through audio!
Don’t Listen To This At Night – Spooky Edition
The next task I selected from the bank was titled “Spooky Season”. We were to find spooky sounds using Freesound and create a scary audio clip for this assignment. The assignment required choosing more than four sounds and adding them to an Audacity-like program. I started my scary audio with some eerie sounds, titled ghosts appear on the freesound tab. This reminds me of a horror movie, though not quite of a ghostly appearance. I next used the sound of something howling; I’m not sure if it’s the wind or an animal, but it makes me think of someone being outside by themselves late at night. Then, because who doesn’t find a spooky laugh creepy, I put a spooky laugh in there. The last two sounds I selected are related to monsters. I used the unsettling sound of a monster breathing heavily in the first one. My last audio was the sound of zombies because I used to get really scared of them when I watched The Walking Dead. Do you all think I had a successful spooky audio? I was rather pleased or should I say scared, with the outcome.
The assignment can be found here, Spooky Season Assignment.
Spooky Season
The final assignment that I chose to do for this weeks three audio assignments was to create a spooky sound clip consisting of at least 4 different sounds. As a result, I came up with a final product that you can listen to below which consists of 5 different sounds. The sounds are a scream, a woman laughing eerily, a person walking through the woods, a regular ghastly sound, and finally the roar of various monsters. The monster noises come in closer to the end because that is where the sound lightens up a little bit and there is only one other sound clip being played. The clip starts with a man screaming and then the woman starting to laugh like crazy so that it sounds like the woman is after the man. Then the ghastly forest sounds come into the picture and that is being played in the background as well as the woman continues laughing. Finally, the clip of a person walking through a spooky forest with ominous sounds is being played in the background as well. I enjoyed making this sound as it allowed me to toy with different sounds and see which sounds paired together well and which ones did not pair that well. Also, the monster noises were a last minute addition because I felt the end of the sound clip was a bit bare and by adding some more rustling and growling, it would make the sound scarier and it did. I was happy with the final product that I came up with and like stated before, enjoyed creating this piece. I think in the future I would try and experiment with actually regulating the sound clips, meaning like adding reverb or amplifying certain parts to make it more dramatic, but for now, I chose to keep it a little more simple and just do what was within my limits.