You in for a laugh? watch my embarrassing freshman year story about high school theater! Just before you judge my picture I love pandas a lot and have nothing against them the picture is a symbol of my story. I had a lot of fun finding effects to my audio gathering ideas from radio stations. Being able to create my own project was a really fun  experience to express myself not just on stage but behind a microphone now which, I could get used to.

All my effects were found on freesound.org this includes the ironical drum beat, The electronic baby laugh, and the school hallway. The story itself was done in two different takes using my own speaker and mic plugged to my computer.

How did I bring this embarrassing story from a long time ago you may ask? I was listening to a lot of comical podcasts recently. It was very surprising remembering that sometimes that comedians are open about sharing their own embarrassing stories really  get the best laugh out of the audience.  So knowing that boosted my confidence to share something very immature and embarrassing from high school because there is not a better time to show off yourself going through puberty than high school.

With this assignment I originally thought I’d add sound effects to some amazing slam poetry i recently found but being unable to willingly write my own poetry for class I decided to add sound to a short story I wrote. I morphed the story into a recital form so it didn’t sound like i was reading an essay aloud. With sound added to a story I hoped to add depth into the basic acts of the day. The story wrote itself but it became difficult to find the exact sounds i wanted.

The story involves the surroundings and the ambient noise in the background. i wanted a more real life feel instead of cartoon-y background music. with this story i hoped to take the listener into the head of a single guy that is often called a workaholic. Always moving with something to do and minimal breaks, I hope this might be relate-able to at least a few others out there.

I wanted to make a radio show with not only a radio-play story segment, but a little song as well. This of course needed a little bit of a framing device and that’s where I came up with DJ Ghost to help tie things together. This is supposed to be a little look into an ultimate Halloween spectacular radio show, that has a few references for the keenest eyes to find. I wanted to draw the audience in with an interesting story but move post it a little quicker than normal, figuring that we all know the main tropes. I felt comfortable moving past them quickly in order to resolve the story. With a tease at the end which helps sell the story as an ongoing serial of sorts. I also added some typical Halloween style sounds to the tracks to help further emphasize the spooky but fun part of this special. The second part, the song, was mostly meant to poke fun at how gimmicky most holiday songs, outside of Christmas, really are. I wanted to have fun with it though, and recreate the most common themes of the genre along with my own thoughts on it to bring my own flavor to the genre. Planning out this project made it much easier to achieve what I wanted throughout. Instead of worrying about where things went, instead I just got to think about the sounds presented and how I wanted things to go, which was super helpful I think.  I also wanted people to laugh with this faux-radio special so I’m really hoping that I achieve that when we do our critiques.

Attribution:

Music:

The Graveyard – Loyalty Freak Music-

The Old Witch Place – Loyalty Freak Music

Classic Horror 2 Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Spellbound Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

SFX:

Found on Soundbible.com

Bats in Cave – Mike Koenig

Footsteps on Cement – Tim Fryer

Heavy Rain – Daniel Simon

Rain Inside House – Mark DiAngelo

Sqeaking door-Sarasprella

Thunder – Mike Koenig

For my audio project, I chose to read ‘The Ass and the Load of Salt’ from Aesop’s Fables. I chose this story because it was kind of funny, and I thought that would make the project more enjoyable. I have to say, that I did not enjoy this assignment. I have never liked audio, because you have to listen to the same sounds over and over again, and it drives me a little crazy.

That being said, what I did first, was find the story that I wanted to read. Then I searched the internet for free sounds that I thought would go along with the story. After finding the sounds, I recorded my voice. I ended up using my phone to record it because it has a much higher quality microphone than my laptop. At first, I tried to record the whole thing at one time, but I kept messing up on words halfway through, so I decided to record the story one sentence at a time, then string them all together in Audacity. Although that made the recording process easier, I think it made working in Audacity a little harder, because I had so many different voice channels.

I did not get this project perfect, but honestly I just couldn’t listen to my voice tell that same story one more time. That being said, here is ‘The Ass and the Load of Salt’, as told by Johnny:

Most of us have heard the saying be careful they could be just a wolf in sheep clothing. I decided to choose this one because it is actually a biblical story, and I can also relate to a lot of people being “fake” in my life just to get closer and have other attentions then being my friend. This was a long Aesop’s fable and I did cut pieces out to make sure it did fit. I didn’t choose any background music because it was just under three minutes and I had some fun animal sound effects so I didn’t need it. I had a good experience in making it beside the fact that I don’t really like my story telling voice. I took Audio Production a few years ago so it was a good review for me. I have definitely forgotten how repetitive it is. I actually had a few screw ups in the recording process, but I was able to take those out. I have children so I thought this had a good moral for kids to not always trust what or who you see based on how someone acts or looks. I thought this version was cute and thought out compared to the smaller fables I found. I hope it flows well and you enjoy.

I’ve always been a fan of horror audio podcasts, so I wanted to try to create one in that likeness. I’ve done small audio related things before, and I usually don’t use sound effects, referring to add mood music, but I think most of the SFX in this project did ultimately add to the projects effectiveness. I originally had a lot more descriptive audio of the characters but had to cut more and more in order to fit it into the audio limit.

I’m ultimately proud of how this turned out although I wish I could have kept some of the extra audio. I will admit I’m not usually confident in my own voice but I feel like my inflection was enough to keep with the mood. The Flatwoods Monster as a creature has always felt like one of those cryptids that was entirely based off of the mood of the time it was created in. I tried to use my language to make it feel more like the 50’s so I could capture that general feeling; using peoples full name, not using to many conjunctions, and just alluding to the time with the SFX as well, like the old radio, and the older sounding car.

Thank you for taking the time to listen, I hope you enjoyed, and even learned a thing or two, about the Flatwoods Monster.

When I first jumped into this project, I was really excited to get right into editing. I had so many ideas on what topic I wanted to choose for this assignment, I had a really hard time picking what I wanted to do most. So I chose to do a short story that was about kindness. I used Adobe Audition to edit all my work. I found it really easy to line up everything in the way that I wanted and with what sounded good. When i first started recording, I began to hate the sound of my voice. After a few hours of editing, I got past that point and started to enjoy making this story. I used many different sound effects and even created my own. I ended up downloading a lot more sound effects then I used. I went to many different websites to get my sounds and music and I plan on going back to get more for further projects

My sites that I used.  

Zapsplat

–www.freesoundeffects.com/

freesound.org/browse/tags/sound-…ndeffectsplus.com/

and I also created my own.

Free Music Archive: Instrumental was where i got the song.

I hope you enjoy. Thanks!

For this project, I really wanted to have fun with it and push myself creatively to see what I could come up with. My solution? Dungeons and Dragons of course. I decided to take an event that actually happened to my Dnd Character Spare, while in a campaign and alter it a bit in order to fit into the time frame. I’m actually quite pleased and proud of how well it turned out.

I had to quickly get over my fear of being embarrassed about sounding like a giant nerd, and that I, like many others, hate the way I sound recorded. However, once I actually started doing the project, I found I enjoyed it quite a lot. From start to finish I enjoyed piecing everything together.

I struggled with the 3 min. Timeframe, and was forced to actually cut several paragraphs from my original script. I made it work however and managed to make the story still make sense while not losing anything important. I was really excited about how it turned out, and hope you all enjoy it as much as I do, and for those of you wondering “Did Spare ever get caught?” I can proudly say no he has not.

-by MaKayla

I chose to pick a story from Aesop’s fables for this assignment, about returning kindness and repaying favors after a friend has helped you out in a tight spot.  This took me a lot of takes and was pretty frustrating to record and edit but that’s part of the learning process.  I’ve never edited audio before and this was also my first time using audacity, but it’s fun to have new tools in your belt.  Audacity was a little bit toward the clunkier side but that could have just been me not knowing how to optimize my editing efficiency yet.

The hardest part to me was adding in background music.  Cutting and editing my voice telling the story and various sound effects added in wasn’t super difficult, but editing music and trying to get the tension and buildup in the song I chose to match key points in the story proved to be kind of difficult.  Matching up tempo and notes so that it could sound as smooth as I could make it took a decent amount of time and the song that I sampled was a lot longer than my story so there was a lot of trimming.

Resources

Image : moralstories.org

Sounds :

Wingflap 1&2 : _stubb @ freesound.org

Watersplash 2 : lwdickens @ freesound.org

Cartoon Doves : WagnerTamborine @ freesound.org

Stream River Water Up Close : jackmurrayofficial @ freesound.org

Song : Mousetrap by Purple Planet Music

So this project was actually something that was surprisingly difficult for me because I did not know what I wanted to talk about. For at least two hours I was scrolling through my laptop searching through stories and poems about nature, love, and happiness, trying desperately to find one that was long enough to satisfy the time requirements but was yet interesting enough to add sound effects. After wasting my time and efforts on this I realized I was going about this the wrong way. I decided to forget about the story and find an audio I liked. I ended up on freesound.org and found the piece by tictac9 called emotional piano. The sound of the song was very soothing yet captivating to me so I set my heart on their creation as my background music for the project. Next I went to the various sound effects created by the past and or current students in the multimedia department and chose different audios that I found appealing and not at all harsh or dramatic. After that I cut the clips and strung all the audios together. During this time I simply listened to what I put together and tried to come up with an idea that allowed my creativity to flow. Interestingly enough I ended up thinking even further into myself and realized that the easiest thing to do was not necessarily coming up with my own narrative but telling a story or realization that most people can relate to.

Moments. The one thing in life everyone has experienced.

If there is one thing I am taking away from this is to not be as excited/nervous as I was when first talking because that caused me to speak pretty fast and loudly when I began which causes me slight embarrassment when I listen to the first part of the audio, but I do like what I created and am happy with the overall turn out. For my first time doing this I like what I was able to make with this project and can call this a slight success.

– Elle Kennedy

Audio: https://freesound.org/s/443344/

Art: https://www.yuumeiart.com/prints/