For the audio dream story assignment, we were to create the story of a dream using again only sounds from freesound.org. This dream has a creepy vibe of perhaps the spirit of a mother and child rocking and humming a lullaby. Its slightly abstract, vague, and brief (as many of my dreams are).

I did actually get around one of the rules by uploading a sound I created to freesound.org (the sound of me humming the lullaby). So I credit myself for the first track I layered. The second sound was the rocking chair from stevelalonde who recorded an old rocking chair in movement on the wooden floor of an apartment in Montreal. The third track I layered was a very subtle quiet piano song by sonsdebarcelona which I found quite beautiful.

TUTORIAL FOR HOW I CREATED MY MASTERPIECE:

I used Audacity to create the single mp3 file. For the lullaby track, I actually created it in Audacity first by recording myself laptop humming my little one a lullaby. Then I added a lot of effects, including echo, GVerb, I edited pitch & tempo, and then reversed it. Then I highlighted the first few seconds of the track copied them, and pasted them to the end of the track, and reversed that selection back. It’s subtle but you might be able to hear what I say since I double reversed it.

For the second track, the rocking chair, I took only the first section of the track then copied and pasted it over and over again, making the sound a bit more mechanical, less natural, to add to the supernatural vibe.

For the third track, the only editing I did was to increase the gain (volume) slightly as it was a very quiet sound and I couldn’t hear it over the rocking and humming. The fact that the sound was a different tune than the humming was also intentional, to make the listener feel one of the two did not belong. Something natural with something unnatural. Once everything was together, I exported the file as an mp3. You may even be able to hear the echos of a baby if you listen closely.

The dream story is meant to make the listener conflicted about the sweetness of the gesture of the mother humming a lullaby to her baby with the perversion of that sound making it clear they are not of this world. Then there is an almost competing sound of the natural sounding piano, which is also soft sweet and melancholy. The fact that it lasts slightly longer than the humming and rocking suggests the natural presence overcomes the ghostly presence, gently. As I said, its an abstract dream story because I find dreams to be more about blurred lines than concrete ones.

Find the details of this assignment, as well as the submissions of others here:
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/audio-dream-stories/