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