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
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.
This week I had to do 3 assignments from the bank. The catcher was that the assignments were only suppose to come from AudioAssignments – Assignment Bank (ds106.us). They also had to contain some sort of course theme of AI or Dr. Oblivion in two out of three assignments. The two assignments that I chose are connected to Dr. Oblivion.
I found one assignment that is called Consult with your Doctor. The instruction are:
“If you give Dr. Oblivion (https://oblivion.university/ ) a questions or directive, he will give a response of up to a minute, which may or may not be loaded with snark. For this assignment you should download MP3 of the Doctor’s response, import it into Audacity and cut it up and insert your part of the conversation, which doesn’t necessarily have to match your original input. You may download a few MP3 responses from https://oblivion.univerty/ to get some personality variation. And you don’t have to let him have the last word.”
I was so excited that I found this assignment because it relates to what I need to complete this week. I started by pulling up Dr. Oblivion and asking him a question having to do with what his office hours are. Which of course, he had a smart remark. If you want to hear my conversation with him about his office hours you can listen to it here:
To get my responses was actually kind of difficult. I had no idea where to star using my own voice because I was not taught in my 30 min intro at the DKC. I ended up using an app on my iPhone called “Voice Memos” Once I got my different responses to Dr. Oblivion, I saved it and sent it through my email. From my email I downloaded it and then of course, Audacity did not accept that format. I then went on google and asked to convert the audio to WAV. This website: MP3 to WAV Converter online – FreeConvert.com saved me multiple times during this week. I was then able to cut and paste the “conversation” with Dr. Oblivion. I think it turned out great in my opinion as this is my first time doing anything close to this.
I would give this assignment an 8 out of 10. 1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest. The reason it was so difficult for me was because I had to find a voice recording app and then I had to convert it into WAV. After that, the cutting and pasting was not necessarily hard but very time consuming.
The other assignment that had Dr. Oblivion in it was a tongue twister. To find a tongue twister, I opened up google and I was giving Tongue Twisters Generator (randomwordgenerator.com) I clicked through a couple of them until I found one that was a little bit silly. I wanted people to laugh at the tongue twister. But the more I tried to make this assignment sound good, the worst it sounded like. The instructions you are probably wondering about are:
“Say any tongue twister as fast as you can and include a background sound to layer it.”
It sounds like such an easy task! But it because more and more difficult because first I had to hear myself talk and then go as fast as I could. I would say that I set myself up for failure! I finally got myself to say the tongue twister as fast as I could like times and by the fifth time, I gave up and I put it into audacity. Then I needed a background sound which I found on Freesound. Putting my voice along with a sound is not as good as it sounds. I had to make the music quiet because I could barley hear myself talk. If you are looking for a good laugh and disappointment, you can hear this audio here:
I would give this assignment an 8 out of 10. 1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest. The reason it is so high in the rankings was because I had to use my own voice and there were people around me and it just sounds horrible.
So that leaves one assignment, one that is not related to a course through AI or Dr. Oblivion. Of course, I picked this next assignment dealing with instruments. I always grew up with my mom always playing different kinds of instruments so I was excited to see this assignment. The instructions are shown below:
“Using a Free Notation software (such as musescore) Create a piece of music using 3 instruments. The piece can be as long or as short as you would like, in any style but it must have 3 separate and distinct instruments.”
In my masterpiece, I used the sounds of a Kalimba, handpan and, a guitar. I had so much fun looking and hearing many different sounds you can get from these instruments. The reason I chose these is because my sister has a Kalimba, my mom has a handpan, and I always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. To hear the song, I made you can click the play button.
I would give this a 3 out of 10 for the challenge of this assignment because I found it fun to create but also it was hard trying to find the instrument that had a similar tone so I could match it with another instrument. The guitar sound I chose was a different sound than just strumming so that way it could somewhat go along with the other instruments I chose.
For a radio show revolving around our characters and AI, I came up with a few ideas.
The first one is to connect with a few other students and introduce our characters and hypothesize about how they might interact. We could then give AI a description of our characters and ask it how it thinks they would interact!
Another idea is to ask AI to give us a few settings for us to decide how our characters would act if placed in those specific settings alone or with the other characters too.
I am not too sure, but I like the idea of having AI give us something to think about in regards to our characters.
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.
The story I chose to do for the Sound Effects Story – Assignment Bank (ds106.us) was of a cat during its feeding time.
The post states:
“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.”
I pondered on this assignment for about a day just listening to the sounds around me. Than the next morning, I had an idea.
This idea came to me when I was feeding the cats this morning and I heard the can open. I thought this was the best idea I could have came up with. I used five different sounds to create one masterpiece. All of the sounds I used came from Freesound. I was struggling to find the last sound I needed to have five different ones and then I thought about the bowl I place on the ground and how that makes a sound!
My lovely creation:
Overall, I would give this assignment a 6 out of 10. 1 being easy and 10 being hard. I say this because finding the sounds was easy, but this was my first assignment I needed to overlap the sounds to get right tempo. It was a lot of clicking buttons and a lot of replaying the audio. We did great in the end; I like to think. For some reason the eating and drinking sound similar but if you listen closing, you can hear the cat swallow the water at the end of the audio.
Below is a sound I created to announce the radio station that Dr. Oblivion hosts.
It starts with an ending of a song and then transfers over into Dr. Oblivion answering my question I asked him which was:
“What is your opening speech to the class.”
I asked this question through Oblivion University
Then his voice starts to fade as the beginning of the next song starts up.
I got this image in my head of what I wanted it to sound like and making a thought in your head was a little bit more challenging than I would have thought. I knew that I wanted the music to fade in, have Dr. Oblivion talk, then fade into another song. It was pretty easy to set up once I got it into Audacity. Overall, I would give it a 3 out of 10. 1 being easy and 10 being hard.
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.
I made this art as random as I possibly could. Different colors everywhere as well as all sorts of different shapes. This art is very vibrant and it gives off happy vibes.
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!