By: Shane Boss

Hells Daily Specials

This is a fun little audio file I made in Audacity for a class project.  It’s a story about a guy who falls into hell and meets the devil.  This project gave me the opportunity to play with the voice changing effects and other free sounds I found over at freesound.org.

 The voices of the two main characters are mine, though you can’t recognise my voice due to the changes I made.  I wanted to create something humorous being the nature of the theme is rather dark.  I had the chance to raise and lower my voice as well as add different pitch layers.  I made several revisions because I kept thinking of new things to add to make it more immersive and interesting.  I wanted to paint a mental picture of the story using sound effects.  It was a pretty fun project and I can spend a lot of time diving into creative projects such as this.  I have been using Audacity for the past four or five years as a hobby, making and enhancing sounds for video games.  Mainly for the NCAA Football video games, creating stadium sound effects, importing my own marching songs, enhanced crowd volume and sounds unique to Autzen Stadium.

Overall I like the results of what I was able to come up with.  The story I made is taken from a punchline joke, toppled with the sound effects, I am happy with the results.  It demonstrates the abilities Audacity has and the fun things you can do with a free program.  I definitely recommend it to anyone who is into creating sounds or mixing songs together.

I have always found folktales and myths to be kinda universal but with their own regional twists. Werewolves have been seen in almost every light now. From terrifying beasts from hell to tween heartthrobs. I always associated with the Faoladh of Irish mythos because that is how I have lived my life for as long as I can remember. I have always been frightening to strangers even when in the midst of an act of kindness. Not to mention the ever present issue of deciding between the primal nature of the wolves and your own humanity. I have always enjoyed Halloween because it is a chance to see different takes on myths and legends and maybe catch a glimpse of a real one. Just one of the many things that I think of when I take my moonlit walks. Happy Halloween to all the indigenius people out there.

Thanks to Reinder88 for the pic and Nox Arcana for the awesome Halloween music.

For this assignment i was trying to get a halfway decent recording using Audacity. This was the first time i had ever recorded something and i think it came out really well. It took a little while to learn Audacity, figure out how to cut,copy,and remove tracks then paste them back in without to many “Bumps”. I had to do the recording a few times, as i kept messing up, but after a few runs i finally got it down in the manner i wanted it (which was supposed to be sort of dark and dreary). I hope it comes across that way at least a little bit. I had a lot of fun finding the few sounds i needed and even recorded the alarm from my own very irritating alarm clock.

This isn’t my alarm clock by the way…..mine is much smaller…and I’m sure it’s much more annoying. Anyways here is the audio track. Hope its at least slightly entertaining.

By: EJ Olson

For this project, I took clips from five different songs and mashed them together into a quick sample. I wanted to make it seem as if someone were trying to tune an old radio and kept coming across a different track from the album. In my mind, this could be used as a commercial, as it displays a few different aspects of the record, and may be used to showcase the music and entice potential listeners.

The editing itself was sort of a pain, as I’m used to using programs such as Reaper and ProTools. There was a little bit of a learning curve when it came to shortcuts and where certain features were located, but Audacity is a simple program, I was off and running in no time.

The music was written and recorded by a band I joined when I was sixteen, and was released in 2010. I drummed and did some vocals on the record.

In producing this story I was really just trying to learn the ins and outs of the program Audacity. I discovered this to be a really fun and useful tool, although for me it took a good amount of tinkering and a fair share of assistance from my sweetie.  Getting started I was a silly sight as I had no confidence in recording my voice, especially since it was early in the day and my voice was still a bit growly.  I began by drinking lemonade followed by a good gargle with Listerine…I do not recommend this…YUCK! This was followed by a series of me walking around the house making weird voices and yelling, loudly to stretch and wake my voice up. My two year old thought I was hilarious. The cat thought I was a strange disturbance, glaring at me in an attempt to get me to vacant the area.  Okay so now I am ready to begin…I think. I start by using my voice to record the story. After many trials  I am satisfied enough with one recording. Now for the fun part of adding accessories sounds. I used freesound.com to get most of my sounds and started by adding background music.  I was really impressed with how this came together with my voice, in fact my voice was not so BLAH!  Next finding little accent sounds and finally some help again from my sweetie with the old man voice. At this point it was a bit of a challenge to stay focused as we were laughing so hard while listen to the voice and sound and how they came to play within the story. We were able to really tweek and edit the sounds so they came out where we liked.  Adding the music and sounds really made the story come to life. It was a lot of fun and this short little story I believe is just the beginning of more to come, and maybe I will go more outside the box.

By Laura Hale

I was trying to accomplish the drama of a full story within one paragraph, as most of Aesop’s fables. A more difficult task than I thought it would be but I decided that since the tale was so short, I’d keep the sound as simple as possible just like the story was. I had to sort out the files that were comparable with my tools as well as good quality with as little background noise as possible unless it added to the scene itself. I felt that the focus of this short piece was to paint a picture in the listener’s mind, to do that I had to find very familiar sounds. Sound quality from third parties and levels of the different sounds also are important, it guides the listener’s focus throughout the story.