I have never done an audio recording before, so this whole experience was rather interesting. I wanted to come up with a story. I really did not know what kind of story, expect that I had wanted to play with voice fluctuations-which in my spare time, is a lot of fun. But recording my voice deliberately was a whole other can of worms. But I learned a lot.

When it came to equipment, I had hoped to experiment with the Snowball microphone from the Media Equipment checkout. But my schedule was rather conflicting, so I opted to use my laptop’s built-in mic for the first time…ever-for this kind of project. I also recorded about 90% of this audio in my room. And that is not built with any sort of acoustics whatsoever. Plus, I was facing my wall, so that sound, I think, was reverberating back into the recording. I was also a bit congested, so that only added to the outcome of the audio. The last few seconds was recorded in one of the study rooms within the library. That was fun.

So in all, the audio is not a great as I had hoped. I found myself doing a lot of retakes, one right after another, on the same track, repeating the same line. If I found a combo that I could work with, I cut and copied, moved, or recreated a new track. That was actually a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I did not give myself enough time to really play with Audacity, so most of what I did was copying, pasting, or cutting.

It was definitely a challenge when the time came for post production. I had recorded three, no, four different voices and had to align them so that, as the story flowed, the sub-voices would come into the right locations. The music was a lot of fun to play with. I learned rather quickly how to pick apart the parts I liked and wanted to use.

Overall, though the quality is not as I had hoped, I did have fun and learned a lot about audio.

Really quickly, I wanted to list the resources used:

1. From Teresa’s music library. I used All About Us-its Royalty free.
2. The image used in my audio file is from Photo by Anete Lūsiņaon Unsplash

I hope you enjoy the audio. Thank you!

By: Maurissa Keller

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/348782084&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true“>

In my audio file, the idea was to tell a story about a teenage boy who gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before he finds out, the devil approaches him disguised as a man. He introduces himself as Maurice and says that he is from the Make a Wish Foundation. Because the boy doesn’t know yet that he is terminally ill, he is rude to Maurice, then Maurice leaves. The doctor enters and tells the boy the news. His heart races and then it jumps time, into the next chapter where the boy contacts Maurice to grant his wish. Maurice manipulates the situation and takes the boy to a different realm where the boy looks like an outlaw and is arrested. They wake up in a jail cell, and the boy just wants to go home. Maurice tells the boy that in order to go back he has to recite a chant. Without questioning what they chant does, the boy willingly participates. Once again they transfer realms into hell. The boy tries to ask what is going on but Maurice turns into his real self and devours the boy.

The meaning or lesson behind the story in a really weird and underdeveloped way, is that sometimes someone will walk into you life offering to help sometimes even in your weakest moments. Despite their kind approach, if you are not careful they might turn their back on you and use you for their own benefit. I was excited for this project, but not very happy with the outcome of my work. I had help from a friend with voices, and I wished I would have directed it more and spoke up more about what I really wanted. 

For my audio project I had a hard time choosing an idea to work on and ended up doing a reading of one of Aesop’s fables. I wasn’t very familiar with a lot of them and decided on one that I could figure out how to add effects to and time with music. I decided on using two tracks that I found off of incompetech.com to add an implication of a tone change in the story I was reading, figuring out how to mix them together without creating a jarring change was probably what I spent the most time on when editing everything together. I used protools for this project because I was already a bit more familiar with it and learning audacity seemed a bit daunting, though I’m thinking about revisiting it later just to know how to use both platforms. I’m fairly new to audio production so everything is still a learning process for me, this project in particular was weird for me to work on because listening to the sound of my own voice played back over and over again made me super uncomfortable, but getting past that I was happy with how it turned out overall. This was my best attempt at a reading that sounded like an audio version of a children’s book.

By: Andrea Del Rio

I have never done any kind of audio work before. Audacity was a completely new thing for me. I started with recording my voice. Well, that was weird. Hearing your voice and nothing but your voice (and externally for that matter) isn’t something that happens all the time. Then I went to freesound.org and started gathering some sound effects that felt right for the story that I was telling. With some googling and watching YouTube videos I was able to work my way through Audacity and finish the project.

I knew right away that I wanted to do my project using a fable. I am a person who loves stories. Stories with a meaning to them are just a plus. I read tons of the Aesops Fables. I went through so many before I decided on one. The fable simply titled “Androcles Fable” just spoke out to me. I really enjoyed it. So, it was then decided that I would use that for my project. While this story s short there are still sad moments, happy moments, and exciting moments. I wanted to try and accomplish to capture all of these moments using sound. I used sounds that followed the lion (a character in the story) and his experience with Androcles (another character). I also chose a music track that (found on the same website as all of the sound effects) sounded like it followed the changing moods of the story.

Overall I think my audio project turned out good. Working with audio was a fun experience and I am excited to delve further into the world of audio.

By: Tevin Goddard

So, I am entirely new to creating sound projects with tools like Audacity, so to others with a lot of experience and a learned ear it will probably not sound very good.

I usually have an easy time with creative projects but, I am sure some of you can relate, I found audacity to be a pain to work with compared to other audio programs that I have been recently introduced to. I struggled for a bit to line up tracks and sequencing. I am sure with practice and time I could turn this project into a quality portfolio piece.

But, whatever, it was fun. I thought I would do something goofy with odd sound effects, cartoon noises, and explosions and crashes. The theme that I chose to use was the reality of a possible mega-quake than could hit the Northwestern United States on any given day. Enjoy.

For me, this assignment consisted mostly of writing a script, recording the audio at home, then layering it over some copyright free music to make it sound like a real ad. The idea was a fake advertisement for Hydro-Bro-Done, the medication that makes you bro again. I really wanted to make it similar to the cheesy ads you hear on late night TV, such as chantix. It was fun coming up with ridiculous side effects and uses for the medication, along with trying to find music that you would expect to hear in a commercial such as this.

The biggest challenge for me was coming up with a script that was appropriate for school, along with getting a good quality recording after being sick. Unfortunately, equipment checkout also gave me the wrong cables for the condenser mic, so I was forced to use my phone as my recording device last minute, which really didn’t give me the audio quality I was hoping for. Getting another person to do the side effects recording was also challenging because it was hard for us not to laugh and mess up the recording, but we ended up getting some good takes.

All in all, I’m happy with the final product and think some people will enjoy the humor in it.

Basically my idea was to make a funny, parody, promotional type song. I think the lyrics are funny and creative, but my rapping and singing skills are not up to professional standards. The process was easy, I found a free music instrumental on the internet then I wrote the lyrics. Audacity is very easy to use. It is more simple then a program like pro-tools for sure. I recorded the song in segments simply because I couldn’t keep a straight face while rapping. Once I got all the parts recorded I synced them together making it complete. Once I was done I felt like it needed some thing else to it. I did some research about autotune and how it works within audacity. I edited my voice and it was hilarious. The production part was easy now the hard part is going to hear it in front of the class. It is so cringe worthy it hurts my soul to listen to. Class presentation is gonna be hard to sit through the embarrassment will be off the charts. I just hope everyone finds it hilarious and gets a good laugh out of it. The process with this project was really fun I hope everyone will enjoy.

I found this assignment very fun and interesting. My goal was to try and make it seem as if a radio host was announcing a ticket giveaway during a show. Since Halloween is coming up it only seemed perfect for this to be some kind of Halloween concert. For those of you wondering, there is actually no concert and no free tickets. I used a program called Logic Pro which is super similar to Garage Band but it is made for the more professional end of producing music and recording. I also used a program like Adobe Illustrator called GravitDesigner to design the artwork for the sound file on Soundcloud. Sadly, I didn’t use a mic but instead just the standard mic inside my MacBook Pro. So when I tried to record this I had to setup some blankets around me and just hoped no background noise would be recorded. After doing this assignment it really makes me want to record some kind of music video. Anyways I hope you enjoy my little being a radio host for fifteen seconds.

This is the fourth project for the Intro to Media Arts class at Lane Community College. Here I took an excerpt from Mr. Poe’s, The Masque of the Red Death. I chose this poem because I like how simply Edgar Allan is able to convey his fantasy story and still give us enough detail to feel a bit horrified.

This was my first time putting my voice online for others to listen to, and the first time in a long time that I’ve used audio editing software. This project taught me that a huge volume of work goes into the recording and mixing of the sound, voice, music and special effects that we hear almost every single day. It also taught me how important it is to make high quality sound if you want people to listen to what you make.

To record this project I used my phone’s voice recording software, and did many takes, to get some emotionality into the voice. I used Audacity to mix the audio but didn’t check before I did my voice recording if it would accept the audio format from the files I made on my phone; well it doesn’t! So, I played the audio from my phone into the computer’s microphone to get the audio onto a track in Audacity.

Mixing the background sound and music was also a challenging surprise. Fortunately, our teacher, Teresa, gave us access to royalty free music and ambient sounds to use for the project. I sliced up pieces of music to match the story, and used the deep drum and thump-like beats from a couple of songs to recreate the dreadfully musical tick-tock described by Poe in his poem.

To close, I think I successfully experimented with sound, but didn’t succeed in making anything very pleasing to the ear. I have a much bigger appreciation of sound designers now than before I started this project (which was obviously 0%…). There is so much to learn and so many variables that I’m looking forward to exploring during and after my time at Lane. Next time, I will give myself more time to find a good microphone, do more research to find other great sounds, and especially choose music around the same time I am recording my voice so that the sounds play off of each other better.

Thanks for reading.

-Daniel Martinez