audacity

Haunted House

Jess

In the course Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling, I creates an assignment, called Spooky Sounds. For this assignment you have to make an audio track using found sounds or your own recordings that is creepy, spooky, scary, basically Halloween inspired.

I started this assignment by collecting some sounds from FreeSound that I thought would sound right in a haunted house. This included bats, squeaky rocking chairs, footsteps, thunder, wind howling, etc. I took the sounds I found and imported them into Audacity. I slowed down the egg timer and the footsteps in order to build suspense with them. I softened the rocking chair and the bats to make them blend better with the wind howling and the wind chimes. For the wind howling, I wanted it to come in twice, but I didn’t want to repeat the same noise so I split the wind howling track into two parts and simply dragged the second part into a different section of the audio track. The door creaking was surprisingly the most difficult sound to find because I had a very specific creaking in mind, and most of the creaking doors I found were either the wrong material or the wrong pitch.

Sounds from FreeSound.org

Sounds Used:
1. timer with ding.wav by keweldog (www.freesound.org/people/keweldog/sounds/181148/)
2. bonitoWindchime.wav by plagasul (www.freesound.org/people/plagasul/sounds/602/)
3. footsteps on wood by Mydo1 (www.freesound.org/people/Mydo1/sounds/198962/)
4. bats1.aif by sofie (www.freesound.org/people/sofie/sounds/9721/)
5. wind_howl2_mono.wav by swiftoid (www.freesound.org/people/swiftoid/sounds/117610/)
6. Door – Creak 02.wav by JarredGibb (www.freesound.org/people/JarredGibb/sounds/219492/)
7. Thunder » Dry Thunder3.wav by juskiddink (www.freesound.org/people/juskiddink/sounds/101948/)

Image:
Haunted House by Open Clips (http://pixabay.com/p-151505/?no_redirect)

DS106 Radio Bumper

Jess

This is a radio bumper created for the audio assignment, “Create a DS106 Radio Bumper,” in Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling (DS106). I first found the kind of sound I wanted for the radio bumper on SoundCloud by searching for Creative Commons EDM mixes. After I found the EDM buildup I was hoping to find, I went to Freesound and searched for sounds that resembled wires running electricity  since the course was also known as Wire106 since the television show The Wire was incorporating into our weekly assignments. Lastly, I needed someone to say “DS106 Radio.” I knew I definitely did not want to record myself, so I searched for free online text to speech computer generated voices that also allowed me to download the audio. I came across YAKiToMe! and used the “Audrey” voice to say “DS1O6 Radio.”

After I downloaded the three various audio clips, I imported them into Audacity and put them together to make the radio bumper.

Sources:

1. COMMERCIAL EDM MIX JAN 6TH 2014 by djsn1 on SoundCloud (Djsn1 – Commercial-edm-mix-jan-6th)

2. Electricity.wav by da_maestro on Freesound.org www.freesound.org/people/da_maestro/sounds/42983/

3. Audrey voice from YAKiToMe! www.yakitome.com/tts?a=T&b=1082481&c=86YxLxdZ&d=T

Radio Logo:
Remixed version of the DS106 logo found here: ds106.us/

It’s a Kodak Moment in the House!

Jess


This audio work is a “commercial” I made for my a radio show project for my Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling course at UMW. The project involved making a radio show that included themes or characters or plot points from the television show The Wire. My group’s radio show was a backwards radio show in that our content was commercials based on the actual product placement in The Wire. Kodak cameras were featured in Season 2 Episode 3: Hot Shots. Ziggy specifically references a “Kodak Moment” as Nick and his deal with Double G plays out.

To make this commercial, I took the audio from the scene where Nick and Ziggy are discussing the camera deal with Double G and the audio from an actual Kodak Commercial and combined the two in Audacity. I moved the introduction part of the music in the Kodak commercial to the end of the commercial audio to serve as background music for when Ziggy is talking about the Kodak cameras Nick and him are stealing for Double G. I cut down the audio from The Wire scene to just the specs and pricing of the cameras, as well as Ziggy’s “Kodak Moment” line.

Sources:

1. The Wire Season 2, Episode 3: Hot Shots
2. Digital Image Studios, Kodak “Moment” Commercial, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkG18KiSMGk