Now presenting, my ds106 radio bumper! I used an AI text-to-speech generator to get the “you’re listening to ds106 radio” audio clip, and then used the tools within audacity to cut that up and make it more interesting. I had some difficulties finding an online program that would let me download the audio clip for free. I’m sure there were ways around this (free trials, screen recording), but since I didn’t need that much precision from the TTS tool, I opted to just keep looking for one that would let me download it with no hassle. Following that, I sourced a variety of weird, eerie music and sounds from Freesound and continued to chop these up and distort them. I was a big fan of the “distort” tool and changing the pitch.
Overall, I’m happy with how it turned out! I used to listen to the radio all the time as a kid (and still do now), so I tried to emulate what I heard there. However, I think ds106 is a little bit more retro/techno/weird than Elliot in the Morning, which led to the decisions to make the bumper a little unsettling.
For the radio bumper assignment, I based my bumper on the iconic “You’re watching Disney Channel’ ads that would air when I was younger. I thought the idea was creative and nostalgic, but mainly because of Defunctland on YouTube. When I looked into what a radio bumper was, the assignment description explained that it is a “short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into.” It reminded me of Defunctland’s “Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery” where the host, Kevin, talks about Network Identifiers. Kevin goes on to explain that bumpers are a fascinating liminal space that is able to tell viewers, “Here is where you are, here is what you’ve been watching, and here’s what’s next.” The video is all-around amazing, so I encourage anyone reading this to watch it. That being said, because this video taught me what bumpers were when I first watched that video, I wanted to reference it by using the Disney Channel theme for my bumper.
To make this bumper, I recorded myself saying my name and saying, “You’re listening to DS106 radio.” From there, I uploaded my recording and the audio clip of the Disney Channel theme to Adobe Audition to start editing. Because the audio was so short, editing was easy but I did run into one challenge. I wanted some music to play first and then for me to talk, but to do that, I had to set the clips at different audio levels and then have them fade into each other. The frustrating thing about Adobe Audition is that I couldn’t figure out how to do a fade transition for the audio. What kept happening was the first audio clip would fade into zero, and the next audio clip would fade from zero, but it was jarring and didn’t sound good. The solution I found told me to set the two clips to different volumes and then overlap each other. That is what I ended up doing, but I am keeping my eye out for a better way to do this.
I like how my radio bumper came out, and I’ve enjoyed listening to everyone else’s. I’m excited to maybe one day hear it on DS106 radio!
Now that we have a #ds106 radio up and running creating a 15 to 30 second bumper for the station. What is a bumper? It is a short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(broadcasting)). So for ds106 it should certainly include “DS106 Radio” and some sort of message about the station with voice over music. Link to assignment https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/create-a-ds106-radio-bumper/
For this assignment, I wrote a bumper and requested Dr. Oblivion to recite it, as I wasn’t comfortable using my own voice. After receiving the audio file from Dr. Oblivion, I uploaded it to Soundtrap for editing. I removed the unnecessary parts, which I found amusing, and added an upbeat song on a separate track. To enhance the listening experience, I incorporated a fade-in and fade-out effect, giving the impression that Dr. Oblivion was speaking live. Additionally, I adjusted the volume for a more polished final product. This editing process was enjoyable, and I look forward to potentially hearing it on the radio show!
Creating a radio bumper was really fun and very cool to mess around with. I wanted to choose background music that would really fit in with our class theme and found some noir themed music that I thought represented the ds106 radio show well as a background. Please let me know what you think!
We will be working with ds106 radio this week, and in some future weeks, so we want you to try your hand at making your first radio “bumper” – a 10-30 second short audio that announces the radio station that is played between songs to remind listeners what they are tuned in to. This should be saved as an MP3 file, and then upload it to SoundCloud. Make sure in Soundcloud that you enable the option to allow downloads (so we can add it to ds106 radio!) Your audio must be embedded in your blog post summary of this assignment. You can embed Soundcloud audio by putting the plain text URL on its own line, and when you publish, WordPress will create a player to allow visitors to listen. The radio bumper is an assignment in the Assignment Bank, so you should tag your blog post correctly when you’re done. You may be able to get Dr. Oblivion to help out, if you ask nicely. Tag: radiobumper
For this I naturally had to go for the Technoir vibe my first thought was all about industrial sounds however I switched to thinking more along an unsettling vibe. I used one of the sounds from freesound made by a creator called looplicator. It was just perfect with some additional modifications I made it more unsettling. I was far less sure of what to actually say unfortunately.
I did try to look ups some examples after a bit of trial and error I ended up with this.
It took a few tries, but I managed to get it done. Ended up coming out far shorter than I wanted since I wasn’t the most inspired and did not know much about radio going in. So, mine is not cool or anything more about telling the viewers to relax and just enjoy. Since my original one was too cynical according to a friend.
Creating my first radio bumper was daunting at the beginning. Im still not sure how to use audacity and to completely honest I forgot that this was a tool I could use for this assignment. So I used iMovie and Voice Memo to create my radio bumper.
I knew I wanted to add a voice over of introducing the radio show and having a little bop with it. So I created the voice over in the voice memos and it only took two tries! Then I went to iMovie and created the background music. I started out with the “bright” theme music and I thought it would be cool to have a bit of a tease into the not-quite-right feeling you have with the tech noir theme of the course. So I split the theme music and cut it in random places added some points of silence like the sound is cutting out. I really wanted the music to go out with a distorted shut-down type of effect to the music but I wasn’t able to find the right tools for that so I went with a record scratch and a telephone disconnect sound effect.
This is our radio bumper for our radio show. The process of creating this was simple. My first step was to find background music using pixabay.com. Next, I used elevenlabs.io, an AI text to speech, to write the script for the bumper. after both were complete, I downloaded both and uploaded to Audacity and meshed the two together. This is the final product, hope you enjoy!
For my first audio assignment this week, I choose the Radio Bumper and put my own twist on it according to my radio show description.
My first step for this was creating a possible radio show name.
The description we have for my group is: Course character talk about pop culture/movies/tv in a talkshow/podcast type of vibe
I came up with name: Film Fanatics & Fictional Friends
The fictional friends in this case are all of our characters.
I wanted the audio in the sound to be neat, so I utilized a voice generator instead of me talking. Next, I used Pixabay for my intro and background music. The audio I used is called Big Band Show. I picked this one because it resembled almost an old time-y tv show intro and gave off fun vibes overall.
Here is my version of what could be the intro to my groups radio show!
In the beginning, the sound is very loud and out there. Then, the music turns into background sound as the actual intro is played. Finally, it picks back up and finishes out strong in hopes to get the listener enticed to what our characters have to say.
For one of my audio assignments, I made a bumper for my group’s radio show. Aggressive Testimonials is still in development, but currently it is “a tell-all about this company’s intrusive tech, featuring 2 “neutral” employees.” I am very excited to see what it becomes and I think this radio introduction is very funny.
I was more creative in this bumper than I was with the commercial. There are several layers of audio; the AI-generated voice (meant to mimic the host of the show); a slight static noise to create a robotic effect; news music to give it a professional, muckraker feel; and a robot noise at the end to make it more ominous and to reenforce the technological themes. I did edit it in iMovie again, but nonetheless I am very happy with how it turned out.
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.)
