I did not originally intend to do an Aesop’s Fable for my audio project. I had grand plans to write/adapt a comedy piece about the conflicting information we all have been receiving about coronavirus. I wanted to turn my frustration with the news into humor. But then life intervened; a sudden (and welcome) influx of graphics work forced me to put school work on the back burner for a few days, which put me significantly behind. I had to “pivot,” as they’ve been saying lately, and decided to do a fable instead.

I chose “The North Wind and The Sun” because when I read it as a child I had an epiphany of consciousness. It literally created an ah-ha moment that I remember to this day. The image of the Sun being able to “invite” the traveler to take off his own cloak after the North Wind had failed to take it off by force was an introduction to a concept I had never grasped before, and changed my thinking forever. I know this sounds dramatic, but it’s true!

In my reading of the fable I deliberately did not include the moral that is usually included at the end. This is because of my Waldorf training — when Waldorf teachers read fables to second graders they don’t include the moral because the students are supposed to come to their own conclusions, not have conclusions fed to them.

I had a lot of fun figuring out Audition and adding the sound effects to my audio project. I used a combination of sound effects from the library Teresa provided and ones I created myself. I can totally see the appeal of being a sound designer!

This project caused me many issues, I must say. I’ve never done any audio editing like this, and trying to use what I did know while trying an entirely new platform was hard to reconcile. Audacity, in particular, did not seem very intuitive. Wherever I expected a certain tool to be, it was in the entirely opposite direction. 

Having said that, it wasn’t all bad, either. I feel like I did learn a little about audio editing; this is actually the second version I had to do of this, and it went by a lot faster than the first. Having been able to experiment on the first one helped this one, you definitely wouldn’t want to hear the rough draft! 

This one I wanted to make feel like it was set in a bar, with the first character telling the second one a retelling of the Emperor’s New Clothes, but from the thief’s perspective. I had my dad voice the thief so I wouldn’t have to listen to myself as much. I used sounds from Epidemic Sound for the background noise, and made the little doodle that constitutes the cover in under five minutes, so dont judge it too harshly, please. 

Overall, I think I did okay. I wish I would have been bolder, and had given a few more audio effects, but with the trouble I was having I am just glad to have made anything at all. 

A story of a child who is going through a very delicate situation, that is the loss of her grandfather, the person that she has a really strong connection with. In the end, we have proof that her grandfather's story was somehow true.

My main goal in this project is to try to go a bit further with my editing. I was exploring the depth of field by applying some ambient effects and also a bit of reverb and echo effects on pos-production. I was also trying to transmit the emotions through the melancholic background in a way that gave the audience enough context to understand what is going on. 

I was playing with the audio in a way to transmit a different perspective such as the audience and the character perspective, creating an effect that shifts the listener from the outside view into the child’s head, going through his thoughts.

I want to make my audience feel some kind of emotion and follow my story without a heavy narration. Mentioning about emotions, I used field record sounds from my personal sound library, that I had been collecting in my audio production class the last term, in that class, we have the opportunity to check out professionals’ gear for field records. Audio Production class (AUD120) is a very interesting class that approaches audio in a fun way with great projects that will enrich your portfolio according to your career path. The class has a super talented and creative instructor to make the experience more pleasing. 

The software that I end up using is adobe premiere (creative cloud is free right now for students until June due to the pandemic. Check it out ;)). It gave me some flexibility to explore different effects available on it.

Thank you for stopping by. 

By Sara Baptista

I love fables, so recording a fable was the obvious choice for me. I wanted to convey a slower, more peaceful listening experience so I chose to create background music with a slower beat. I used a sampler to create the soundscape and then added in the fly buzzing as well as the transition during the Bull’s stinging reply. I also dropped the tuning down because it’s kind of a depressing fable. My voice sounded unpleasant, so I dropped and corrected the pitch so that it’s a bit smoother to hear. I think that it works very nicely for the Bull’s response. I’ve made music before and have experience with editing, so it was a pretty smooth process. The only rough spot was when I got stuck recording my voice over and over again, so I finally decided to go another route. Overall, I think that it turned out pretty suited for the story. After creating this, it seems like it would be fun to edit audio for a podcast or for storytellers. I hadn’t done much editing of spoken word and it was a pleasant change of pace. 

Thought I’d do something fun for this project. So I wanted to make this goofy and fun fake advertisement for Dungeons and Dragons. What Inspired me to do this project is my D&D party. Ever since Covid-19 hit and we were all starting to go into quarantine, I started to get anxious. But one of my friends invited me to play a campaign with a bunch of his friends, and right from the beginning I had a blast. My D&D party has helped me through this pandemic and has giving me inspiration to embrace my creativity. So this Audio is dedicated to you guys!

Also for my audio project I wanted to express the fun and humor in D&D, the fun of goofing around with your group and messing around with your DM by making your character do ridiculous things in the game. And I hope that is a pretty clear message in the audio. It was was hard to find sound effects that satisfied me, so a few sounds in the audio are a mix between two or more sounds combined together, like the magic spell, sword fight, and the Manticore noise at the very end, which is a combination of a Lion roar and the crackling of fire to resemble it breathing fire at the player. Also want to thank my sister’s fiance for voicing a few lines for the stereotypical D&D nerd.

Overall I had a fun time doing this project and I hope I can make some of you smile with this audio. I can’t wait to see everyone else’s creations. I hope you all are having a good day, and I’ll see you around. -Gyllian Mullins

Although I had some difficulty to record my voice on Audacity somehow it does not record, I was able to record from my iPhone and imported the sound for editing on Audacity. I enjoy the process of looking for the sound effects and identifying the right feeling sounds matching the content. It is a journey to explore Tibetan culture for me as well.

The content that I reading in the Audio is from a child book, Pola’s Flower, one of my son’s books. I am so glad to do the project to convert something from the book into audio. I would be so proud to share it with my son later when he starts school next year.

Pola’s Flower is a true story based on a Tibetan girl and her family. Since the Chinese occupation of Tibet, ten of thousands of Tibetan Children have fled their homeland. Many of them without their parents. These youth risk imprisonment, injury, and death in a perilous journey across the Himalayas in search of cultural, religious, and educational freedom. My husband was one of them who tried to cross the Himalayas on his foot ended with being torched and jailed for months. My son is born in the United States, free land of religion, being apart from our motherland, but we will let him remember what Tibetan culture is and what Tibetan history is through reading him books and learning the language.

Tibet is one of the most beautiful places where I have been and Tibetans are some of the kindest people whom I have known in the world. they practice compassion into their daily life, even without bad thoughts towards their enemies who were taking their country. They have living proof that the goodness in their hearts is the most important thing, which we will pass on to our son.

I really like this book as it is a way to tell the culture and life in Tibet, as well as its history. This book is written by Diana Lynn Nadeau, who has had ten years of intensive training in Tibetan Buddhism. She is also a Certified Mediator. The illustrator of this book, Lobsang Gyatso, who is a very good friend of mine and my husband’s hometown mate. He is a local artist making very unique art pieces made of clay and he sales them at the Eugene Saturday Market.

Background music is from Tibetan Buddhism script of Maha Karuna Dharani.

Audio Project “Living As A Human” A poem by Erin Hanson

For my audio project, I decided to read the poem “Living As A Human”, by Erin Hanson. She is a young Australian poet who is in her early twenties. I love most of her poems and am often surprised by her insight.
This was a fun project and I look forward to doing more. I had a few issues along the way but it worked out. I had to write in code to get my computer to allow Soundcloud to use my microphone. Who knew?! I was able to record myself and then added music by Chronotope Project. I was listening to the radio a few months back and really liked what I heard. I had Siri listen and tell me what song I was listening to. I looked him up and sent him an email asking him if I could use his music for my project. Turns out he is a local and his wife teaches at LCC! Small world. If you like meditative music, you should check it out.
I also tried making my own music with my Kaossilator, which is an electronic instrument with a touchpad. It has hundreds of built-in options plus the added bonus of being able to upload and store your own sounds. I had fun with it but ultimately had to ditch the idea because I’m still learning my new gear. I can make sound effects at home but I need to learn the ins and outs of my new(ish) computer before I can really make it work. I might even sell some sounds at some point. I love having fun with my electronic instruments.
I looked at a lot of sites to find sound effects. Wow, the world wide web is a big place. It sure is easy to get lost in everything there is to see.
I utilized sound effects from soundeffectsplus.com. They’ve got a lot of fun stuff and it’s nice and organized, especially compared to some of the other free sound effects sites. I’m looking forward to creating more sounds! Except I probably won’t read anything. I don’t like the sound of my voice. Hahaha

For this project we were required to pick a story, create an ad, etc. and record and edit audio in Audacity. I chose to work with one of Aesop’s fables titled “Belling the Cat”. Going into this project I had ideas of thematic readings I’d been required to listen to in school, ones where there was clear audio and fun background sounds to complete the story being told. I was hoping to replicate this and have a final project that sounded similar to an assigned audio reading.

 In my time at Portland State University I took an entry-level audio engineering class. A class in which we had a few projects where audacity was required. Because of this I, foolishly, figured I’d have a super easy time and procrastinated the project. Much to my surprise when I began my workday I found that I had retained practically nothing from my past time spent working with audacity. Luckily as I got farther along a few tricks came back to me, but for the bulk of editing and exporting I had to rely on google searches. My main snag was getting my audio recording into Audacity. Since I’d recorded it in voice memos on my I had to look up how to convert simple audio files into a .wav format. Then I began sourcing sound bytes that I wanted to use to compliment my voice recording. All in all, I’m happy with my finished result, though I’m not sure the end project is what I had in mind at the beginning.

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