I know I’ve been a little MIA the past couple of days, and I apologize. This weekend was crazy with work and seeing my family, and unfortunately my ds106 work suffered from that. However, it is 2am and I’m ready to rock. I finished my first audio assignment, the Sound Effects Story. I have never ever done anything with audio editing or downloading or anything like this before so it was a bit of a challenge. Luckily, Google is awesome and gave me some good tutorial sites to work with. Audacity also has a wiki with tutorials for it as well. The first thing I found most useful was finding the time shift tool (it looks like a double sided arrow) because that was definitely necessary in order to make this story. I would have been lost without it. The second thing I found most useful came from Araba Boakye’s blog. I wanted to listen to some other people’s work before I attempted anything. Her sound effects story was great, and in her post she said that she found it easier when she imported the sound effects in the order in which she wanted them to play. I completely agree with her. I can see how it would be confusing trying to piece all of the sound effects together when they are all jumbled up. It wouldn’t be terrible, but importing them in order definitely made the process much easier.

For my story I decided to display the sounds at a child’s birthday pool party. I’ve been craving some sun and the pool lately so this was the first thing that popped into my head. My sources are from:

cheapChineseRestaurantBDayParty.flac – Pullover aus Milch
Sprinkler.wav – bsumusictech
waterballoon.wav – steveygos93 (x3)
POOL_SUMMER SOUNDS_LARGE SPLASH.wav – snarfdude
ahaha.wav – yacou
happy-birthday.wav – TwistedLemon

Here is my sound effects story with the explanation below:

I started with some music that sounded like it was for a child’s birthday party. Then to show all the different activities going on, I used different sound effects. I started with a sprinkler (kids could be running through it), and then went to the water balloons. I figured, once one water balloon is throwing, there has to be more. I added three of the water balloon noises to get the effect of a water balloon fight going on.  Then I went on to the sound of someone jumping into the pool and making a splash and overlapped the end with the laughter of kids, to let the audience know the kids are having fun. I added a “happy birthday” at the end to show that it was a birthday party. I hope you all enjoy it!