Hey kids. Guess who finally decided to turn in an Audio assignment? This loser (after lots of unnecessary worry and nightmares about people hearing my voice recorded.) Ok so let’s get this out of the way first: wowzer I am NOT a voice actor. Fun factoid I was awake in the dead of night recording the voices for this and it took hours of retakes because my voice was cracking while I blushed furiously at how embarrassing this is for me. But I guess I pushed through it.

Follow Yinora the incompetent Guardian who has been separated from her Fireteam on the Dreadnought. She’s walking through a dark maze of thrall breeding grounds and I tried to pick ambient sounds that would help the listener visualize what was going on. Her voice sounds that way on purpose because I was trying to emulate the muffled echo of helmet comm systems but uh- it was hard. Lots of Low Pass and Amplify with an Echoing sprinkle. All sounds besides my voice were found on freesound.org. I wish I had put more time into this project but my huge anxiety towards voice work was a problem. Some sounds were very loud and others were soft so I really tried to level them out into something decent to listen to. The one thing I’m sorta happy with is Orin’s A.I. voice effects, not his voice itself. Kinda corny but it was fun to script out the situation Yinora got in.

Wow, I lost this track and had to remake it!  I guess I’m ready for the real world of media hiccups!

This was fun to make.  It is a fake newscast that is abruptly taken over by my rap about current states of affairs in a political and cultural rap diatribe.   Just a little ditty I came up with to fit the project, but excited to work with other music artists in the area to create dynamic rap/dance tracks to put together choreography and music videos.  I wanted to do something that showed my writing skills, rhythm, and humor becuse I am also interested in sketch comedy writing as well.  Thanks for listening, and I hope it gives you a better idea of who I am as a person, and an artist.

• Joey Johnson, http://www.joey-johnson.com

Originally I was going to have a friend of mine rap over one of several beats I found on freesound.org, and put some sound effects at the beginning and end, but we couldn’t quite get it together within the time limit, so I put loops of the three beats I liked the best together and recorded a commercial over that track.

I did a commercial for a classic hip-hop night at a fictitious club called The Golden Pineapple. I chose this because I love classic boom-bap hip-hop but, the last time I checked, an autotune-heavy, candy-coated kind of hip-hop was popular on the radio and at many clubs, and that stuff just is not for me. I basically just made up an ad for the type of night I would enjoy attending or DJing.

I was really surprised how easy it was to loop the beats and switch from one beat to another. The Audacity program makes it quite easy to loop or change stuff right on beat. Getting the Audacity music track I made on my PC to import the vocal track I recorded on a Mac at school was much more difficult than I expected though. It was really fun playing with the beats, but definitely frustrating at times dealing with that damn vocal track. I hope you guys enjoy the beats.

The process of coming up with a interesting story, would not come to my mind whatsoever. Plus I just didn’t want to do a story at all for the time being. So the final outcome I came out with was deciding on singing a acapella of a song, because I love singing and there’s no story at all. So the music I chosen was Tetris Theme A, because it is a most well known classic video game song made by a Russian composer that I think most people know of. I thought about doing Mario or Zelda, but it felt to stereotypical. I felt so full of awe when doing the project, because I haven’t sang much in a while, and hearing your own voice is in a long time.

The process could have been better, but really almost anything could have been better. I couldn’t do a deep base voice and couldn’t even whistle. Like it just surprises me how do people whistle, it’s like impossible for me! Also I don’t like the picture the way it’s frame, and I kept trying to get a good image, but I gave up wasting my time.

So hopefully you will indulge yourself by hearing my ethereal beautiful elegant voice. I’m not tying to sound arrogant, I’m just trying to stay positive, because honestly this project drove me nuts! Just so you know I decently enjoyed this project.

This is not what I wanted to do!  I struggled with this project. This piece is by no means creative. There are not any cool sound effects, but It was a challenge nonetheless to mold Shia’s voice from having yelling to speaking mid sentence; and making it flow somewhat well. I did have many ideas but unfortunately there were issues with each, whether they were technical or impractical. One of my original ideas was to tell my own story in the form of a voice recording blog, by my character.  It would have ended with an awesome plot twist but that doesn’t matter now. My second idea was to do a parody of a song. My favorite of all my ideas was to tell my own epic, but I didn’t have enough time ( even with class workshop) to finish it to my standards. In the late twilight hour before this project was due, I turned to the option of just going with a fable; regardless that I wanted to do something of my own. But even then I was distasteful of following through with it… So here you have the end project of a stressed and repressed idea of mine.

I did have previous experience with an earlier version of Audacity, so it was nice to return and discover more helpful tools. I do plan to continue using Audacity now that it is more user friendly.

I think overall as a class we were all challenged, whether we were limited by sound length, resources to sounds, or what have you.

By Kendrick Taylor

Since Halloween is this weekend, I decided to recite Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven” for my audio project. I have always been a fan of Poe, and when I was a kid this poem used to creep me out quite a bit. I used five audio tracks; thunder, a quiet rainfall track, a Raven’s caw, my voice audio reciting the poem and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I felt that this created a very creepy atmosphere, and also sounds similar to what Poe himself was experiencing that frightful evening when the raven sat upon the bust above his door. I would like to issue a warning, though, that I am NOT an actor. The most difficult part of this assignment was to try and convey emotion while I was reading the poem (and trying to breathe away from the mic). In that sense I am not quite satisfied with the final outcome, but the sound effects and the music go together quite nicely, and I was very excited to hear that I had created a very compelling background. If I was to do this again I would have probably taken more time to memorize the poem so that I could have put more emphasis in certain places. All in all it was a fun experience!

By Keasey Freed

Since Halloween is this weekend, I decided to recite Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven” for my audio project. I have always been a fan of Poe, and when I was a kid this poem used to creep me out quite a bit. I used five audio tracks; thunder, a quiet rainfall track, a Raven’s caw, my voice audio reciting the poem and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I felt that this created a very creepy atmosphere, and also sounds similar to what Poe himself was experiencing that frightful evening when the raven sat upon the bust above his door. I would like to issue a warning, though, that I am NOT an actor. The most difficult part of this assignment was to try and convey emotion while I was reading the poem (and trying to breathe away from the mic). In that sense I am not quite satisfied with the final outcome, but the sound effects and the music go together quite nicely, and I was very excited to hear that I had created a very compelling background. If I was to do this again I would have probably taken more time to memorize the poem so that I could have put more emphasis in certain places. All in all it was a fun experience!

By Keasey Freed

This assignment was to introduce the students to using audacity and other media recording software. I found it to be a really challenging assignment.I chose to go with one of Aesop’s Fables because I like the moral advice they give. The voice I recorded is my own with a pitch up effect added. By pitching my voice up It makes the story more animated and easy listening. The sound effects were found in imovie catalog. I wanted a real down to earth country feel to my story. I wanted to cater more to children rather than the adult audience because I believe they are more prone to listen to audio stories. The background music was something I found in the imovie effects catalog. I went for a real country feel to my audio story. I wanted to create something children would want to listen to and or adults. I hope you enjoy and find this audio story to your liking!

Project 4 Audio – Lenore by Edgar Allen Poe

For my audio project I was originally looking for a Stephen King short story to read and add sound effects to. The idea there was to give a creepy effect in the spirit of Halloween. However, as it turns out, “short” stories are actually pretty lengthy. Very lengthy in fact; just short enough to not be called a “novel”. So instead I went with Lenore by Edgar Allen Poe, because he’s a little weird and dark. I honestly should have gotten someone else to read it for me because, realistically speaking, I was probably not the best option. Actually, hearing my own voice is mortifying. Nevertheless, hopefully the dry, monotonous tone of my voice goes along with the theme of Poe’s sullen, dreariness.  As far as the background audio goes, I was a little lost as to what I should include in the background. I initially figured I would just have some creepy strings playing in the background and add a little key sound effects here and there, but I learned that the poem itself has a natural tempo to it that made finding a song a little challenging. I’m pretty green when it comes to audio in general, so this project proved to be an uphill battle, but this was definitely a learning experience and I’m hoping the final product does enough to give some sort of creepy experience.