This was my second assignment submission.  The assignment is to imitate some form of weather using only your voice and things within arm’s reach of your computer (if you’re messy it makes things a lot easier).  I got the idea from when we had to add sound effects to the silent film in class.  Also I went on a picnic today and it rained, so I wanted to create rain so that I could show it that it’s not better than me.  Perhaps a bit petty, but I’m still peeved.  Take that, rain.

I feel like many types of weather can be imitated pretty easily.  Rain might be the most simple, but there’s always potential for wind, thunder, meteor shower — whatever your heart desires.  This assignment is also a good way to get practice with layers and playing with volume levels to make transitions between effects sound more normal.

For my submission, I used three makeshift instruments: my computer, a solo cup, and a newspaper.  A tapped my computer screen to make the initial isolated raindrop sounds.  I then added a new track to my Audacity file, and tapped on the solo cup, which was a bit louder than the screen.  For the heavy background rainfall I crinkled the newspaper.  I initially thought the paper might sound like faint rumbling, but it wound up sounding a lot like rain.  For the newspaper sound I intentionally let the sounds of the other tracks bleed into the recording.  This made a pretty cool effect.  Once I had all of the tracks in place, I played with the levels of different segments to make them blend together better.  This was a pretty easy project, but i think that if people complete it before working on their radio shows it’ll make the process go more smoothly.