By: Jurnee Mickelson

For this assignment, I wanted to tell one of Aesop’s Fables, “ The Bear & The Bees ”. These short stories are intriguing and interesting to read. I wanted to find one that had wildlife characters, and an environment in the forest. I also chose “ The Bear & The Bees “ because it was a Fable that I hadn’t heard before and wanted to learn something new along with this project. My ultimate goal with this P4 Audio project was to tell this story using dialog, including environmental sounds and give the listener a more immersive listening experience. Adobe Audition is super new to me, and I had a great time playing around with the program for this assignment. There is still so much  to learn and utilize in Audition and I look forward to improving my audio work. The audio effects and ambient noises I used were all free, non copyrighted audio downloads on freesound.org. They range from sounds like ambient forest/field sounds, with birds chirping in the background, a swarm of bees flying around and darting near the microphone, to a cannonball splash sound effect to enhance the section of the fable that talks about the bear evading the bees by jumping into the water. The Sound Cloud bear photo is also non copyrighted and free to download. Overall I feel like I understood this assignment and learned more about audio editing programs. 

This assignment was a fun journey of learning new skills and eventually being able to realize my initial idea. In the beginning I had many different scenarios in mind, but I was able to settle on my final product because it is what I found the most inspiring. My concept allowed for a lot of room to expand on sound effects and the overall atmosphere I wanted to convey. It was a bit challenging in the beginning trying to find ways to get the effects I wanted in my audio, as well as collecting all the sounds I wanted to use; but once it started clicking it was a smooth process that really became enjoyable. My least favorite part was recording my own voice for the narration, because I could never feel satisfied with my voice and the way I read my story. But once I added all of my various audio in to create my mix, I felt satisfied with the result. I want the feeling of my project to be a calm, cozy morning in a beautiful hillside town straight out of the Hobbit movie. The Shire.

By: Haley Johnson

Name: Pretend Podcast by Lady Diaz
About: You are listening to the last minute of a random mystery episode from a pretend podcast.
Production progress:
1. Come up with story ideas.
2. Search for audios that match what I had in mind.
3. Record my voice, multiple takes.
4. Edit the audio to match in loudness, get rid of noise, crop unwanted areas.
5. Rearrange and adjust so that the story is clear.

Struggles: I lost some voice files and had to retake everything halfway through.

What I learned: This is the first time I have created a story through sound. For any obstacles encountered such as altering voice, removing unwanted noise, I used youtube tutorials to help me and learned new editing techniques.

Sources:
Non Dialogue audio- https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=guitar
Music by The Pop Winds- https://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Pop_Winds/
Dialogue: Lady Diaz

Images: Lady Diaz

Count Dooku the Oscar Winner

I knew from the beginning I wanted an audio project related to Star Wars. Some of my ideas were Alan Rickman acting as a Star Wars character and a trio of heroes trekking across a desert. But given my love for movies, and Star Wars is more than movies to me, I wanted to make an audio project that had the two coexisting. The most common high point for movies is the Oscars, and what if a Star Wars character was a Best Actor Oscar winner? Someone particular came into my head: he’s a bad guy who only appeared in the prequel movies, but the actor had a fantastic acting style, so I thought the character would be a good fit.

I knew I could finish this with good writing and my voice impression. Crafting the perfect lines that would resonate with fans of both Star Wars and the Oscars was a challenging but rewarding experience. The writing needed to balance between Dooku’s fictional persona and the real-world nature of the Oscars. Recording the speech was a thrilling experience. I worked meticulously on my voice modulation to emulate Dooku’s distinctive, refined tone, ensuring it sounded authentic and immersive. The recording process was a mix of retakes and adjustments until I achieved the desired result. This phase allowed me to hone my voice-acting skills and familiarize myself with audio editing software.

After the lines I wanted to be recorded by myself and a colleague, post-production was another crucial phase. I integrated the ambient sounds of an Oscars ceremony to create a believable atmosphere. Properly mixing and editing the audio was essential to ensure a seamless, professional-quality final product. This stage introduced me to the technical aspects of audio production, including sound editing and effects, which I found incredible.

Overall, my audio project, featuring Count Dooku’s Oscars acceptance speech, was a creative journey that allowed me to explore the fusion of fictional and real-world elements. It was a project that tested my scripting, voice acting, and audio editing skills, and the result was a captivating and unique piece of audio that I’m proud to have gotten done.

The link embedded here will disclose that I don’t own anything copyrighted.

by: Simon Edwards

By: Fedya Lockwood

I was trying to make a creepy song that reminds me of sirens. I named the song “the wail of sirens” because of this. I struggled recording the instruments correctly, though, so the audio isn’t so good. I also added wave sounds to match the theme. Since we had to do some storytelling, I added the song name, something about sirens, and something about myself and how I feel about the ocean. 

I’ve always liked the ocean, and living near it. I’ve always felt a deep connection to water, and it reflects through sports I played growing up. I did water polo, competitive swimming, and boat rowing. But the ocean has always resonated with me, especially when I was living in Humboldt. It was one of the reasons I stayed there so long, but life brought me to the city. One of my favorite beaches is also Cape Kiwanda, which is on the northern coast of Oregon. I used to go there with my family a lot, but now I just go by myself. 

It’s been a while since I swam consistently, and I miss it a lot. I hope when I’m older I can live somewhere cold, near a big body of water. That’s the dream.

In this assignment, my goal is to set up an environment that lets the listener fully immerse themselves in a story. Using special effects such as owl noises, ambient sounds, and dreamy, fairy-tale-like music, I wanted to craft a narrative that sounded like a lullaby. The creative use of a free soundtrack and enchanting special effects transport our audience to a place where the story is happening: a forest. By changing the tone of voice I try to impersonate the characters. This audio offers the comfort of a bedtime story. It’s like an escape, a way to the most peaceful of dreams. The Audio tells at the same time a story and teaches us a great life lesson. It shows how flattery can sometimes be used against us.

By Lisa

By: Jeremy M. Roman

For my audio assignment, I chose to read an Aesop fable. I decided to read The Ass And His Driver. It is a short story about a stubborn donkey who doesn’t listen to reason and has to suffer the consequences in the end. I wanted to tell the story with lots of sound effects to go along with the account to make you feel like you are there in person. I also tried to make it more dramatic with the sound effects and Music. This project was really fun to do I got to learn a lot about how this audition program works and all the things it can do. I also learned how I can download sounds from sound archives online, that’s where I found the donkey noises and the rocks falling off the cliff sounds. I really enjoyed learning how to manipulate audio to make it sound good. My friend Casey played the music on his guitar to go along with my story which added a really good dimension to it. I really like the moral of The Ass and His Driver, it is something I need to practice in my own life. I often make decisions against the advice of others and later have to realize they were right all along and that I was wrong. It is not easy to admit when I have been wrong.  Overall I really enjoyed this assignment it helped me learn a lot about using audition and learn new skills to edit sound.

By, Danielle Hilliard