Audio Narrative: Final Reflections

[benmiller314]

This is a space where you'll be able to post your final-for-now thoughts on your audio unit projects, your audio narratives. These are both a space for you to think back on what you've learned, and how, and also to help me appreciate the work you've done (whether in successful product or ambitious process).

At a minimum, this should include:

• at least 500 words describing the work you did
• at least two screenshots showing your work in progress
• at least one screenshot of feedback that you responded to in revising (and please say how)
• your own assessment of how you met the baseline criteria for the class, as well as aspirational criteria as appropriate

This will be due by Tuesday, February 7th.

[arianakeith]

For my audio narrative “All Nighter” my goal was to try and create a storyline following a student pulling an all nighter for an exam they have the next day. The feel I wanted to create was calm, but at the same time slightly chaotic to resemble anxiety. I chose calming background music by Lofi Girl, who I regularly listen to when studying myself. This music created that calming and relaxing feeling in the background. However, to represent the anxious feelings a student has while cramming for an all nighter I experimented with layering of common sounds such as flipping papers, writing and typing on a laptop. My change in location appeared mid way through my audio narrative when the student got up to make themselves a cup of coffee. When they came back from making their coffee, it was back to studying. At the end of the audio narrative you will hear an alarm going off, as it is now morning and the student must get ready to go to class. You hear them say “it's time”, as all this cramming has come to an end, and it is time to go to class to take the exam.

My first screen shot above is representing how I started to play around with effects. I wanted to create this illusion when the music started. I wanted to create a tunneling feel, or warping of reality as when the music starts, and the studying exhumes, that student is almost in another world as they are working. This effect was used in multiple transitions, as it was used to pause and resume the coffee break as well. I applied this effect with the same phaser settings in each of those breaks in music.

The next screenshot I am including is when all of my audio editing was about done for the narrative. The credits audio clip is not included. I wanted to use this screenshot to truly show my progress with layering but also to demonstrate the attention to detail in arranging clips. My largest task was getting timing correct, as throughout my audio narrative I had 14 different sounds. Figuring out the storyline and how to sequentially incorporate each of these, for an appropriate amount of time was the bulk of this project for me. I wanted to create an interesting and creative story with these sounds, through layering and intentional sequencing. This screenshot shows that progress as my final draft was coming near.

Above are two screen shots from my peers giving me feedback on my first draft. As you can see they note to pay attention to volume. I took this into consideration by normalizing my background music to make it slightly quieter, and normaling my “studying” sounds of writing, flipping papers, and typing to become a bit louder and bringing these sounds to the forefront of the audio.

I believe that I have met all the baseline criterias, as well as reaching and successfully completing some aspirations. For the baseline requirements, my audio narrative reaches a bit over 4 minutes, which I confirmed was allowed. I had a change of scene to represent “something happening” when I had the student make a cup of coffee. There were three audio tracks recorded by me personally, not including my credits. The cup of coffee had two different recordings, and the audio at the end where I say “it’s time” is my own. Then I have 11 sounds not by me, which I have credits for including licenses listed in my ReadMe. Lastly, I have at least three layers of audio tracks overlapping at various points in my audio narrative. For aspirations, I consistently used normalizing of volume on multiple audio tracks, I tried to produce seamless transitions, paid close attention to feedback from my peers in workshop implementing changes, experimented with Audacity effects, ultimately using the Phaser effect, and lastly tried to create a climax to my story, when the alarm goes off at the end, and the student has to go take the exam that they were preparing for throughout the duration of my audio narrative.

[taylorjenkins]

This soundscape project was my first introduction to any type of audio layering, effect and recording software, so I was a little bit nervous going into it. I was unsure of what I was going to record for my project, but when we did the reflection exercise in class talking about our favorite places, I immediately thought of New York City and with that city comes traffic. I was originally planning on doing a day in the city, but somehow ended up with a person in a hurry and stuck in traffic. I began with trying to plan out what the scene of my soundscape would include because that was something that I knew how to do. I played around with audacity a little bit, mainly just utilizing the sounds that we worked with in class to get familiar with the software. I knew that one goal I wanted to achieve in this project was figuring out how to manipulate the sound so that you get the feel of cars passing and the fading sound they make once they are far past your own, which I ended up achieving by normalizing the sound, then lowering and increasing certain parts of the audio clip.

These two horn sounds gave the impression of a passing car honking their horn and it fading as they got farther away. I was particularly happy with this sound piece because I felt that it emulated what I was trying to portray. I also had to decide what I could record on my own and which sounds would be difficult to capture using my phone’s recording device. I ended up recording a lot of my audio pieces myself, which hit a baseline criteria, because I had certain clips that I wanted to sound very authentic and specific. For example, I wanted the action of getting into your car and starting it to feel realistic. This section of getting into my car and starting it then backing out while the music immediately begins to play was one that I was particularly proud of because I had to layer multiple audios on top of one another to create a seamless transition onto the road; this also hit a baseline criteria of layering three audio tracks at once (the background music is also layered but was unable to fit into this screenshot).

Picking what music that I wanted in the background was difficult, partly because most of what we listen to when we’re driving is copyrighted. I found a cover of a song that I liked, which was more upbeat and cheery than the frustrated driver’s mood. I picked this contrast of music on purpose because I thought of what I listen to, even in a rush, and in this instance, I don’t have enough time to scroll through my music to pick a song, so I wanted to simulate what it was like to have a randomly shuffled song come on in the midst of a hurry. Throughout the song, I wanted it to increase in volume in moments of silent driving since that is when we mostly focus on the music that is playing and to decrease when the directions are being given or the narrator gets wrapped up into her road rage.

I was unsure of how to end my audio piece because in the end, the narrator is still left having to look for parking, which I’m sure is a problem for most of us, especially in Oakland. This piece of advice helped me to understand that I should subtly face the music after she declares that there is no parking, instead of keeping it going for a while then suddenly stopping. I think that my ending was playful and left open for interpretation of if she will make it on time or how one deals with this situation. I am happy with my current soundscape and think that I hit upon a lot of personal audio editing goals for myself, especially being new to this technology. I think that I hit all of the baseline criteria- having my audio be close to 4 minutes long, having a change of scenery from leaving her apartment to getting in the car and on the road, also recording sounds by myself and using sounds found online. I also believe that I hit a couple of the aspirational criteria; I think that my audio project created a seamless transition from start to finish, even when moving from ‘scenes’. I also think that I used relative volume to depict cars passing with fading horns and driving sounds. I also learned how to normalize volume so that the background music or car horns didn’t drown out the sound of my narrator or the GPS.

[suchiattota]

My audio narrative project, titled “The Cover-up”, was a very exciting project and I enjoyed every step in the process of completing this project. “The Cover-up” follows the story of two friends burying their dead roommate in the woods. The audio begins after the murder takes place, so we don’t know who committed the murder. The dialogues for the voices of the two friends were carefully written such that one of them is loud and assertive and the other is quiet and nervous. This was done so the audience can interrupt who committed the murder themselves, it could have been that the assertive friend killed the roommate and has forced the quiet friend to help, or it could have been the quiet one that did the killing and goes into shock so the assertive one takes the responsibility of covering it up, or as my friend said, there could have been a third person all along who committed the murder and we hear their footsteps but they just haven’t spoken. The story is upto the interpretation of the audience and even the ending adds to this. The narration ends with the faint sound of the police siren slowly getting louder and one of the voices questioning nervously if it’s the cops and the audio abruptly ending leaving upto the audience to imagine what might have happened.

This story is something I am proud of because it pushed me out of my comfort zone to think of an interesting narration, especially considering my first idea was to do a simple day in the life. The story went through minor changes throughout the process of this project to match with the audios I found online and recorded myself, but the idea and goal of my narration remained and same since the beginning and I believe I did it justice. The first hurdle I faced was finding suitable audio clips online. It was a time-consuming task to listen to multiple variations of a single audio, for example, the opening of a car door, and picking the best one. Most of my audio clips were obtained from freesound.org and the remaining were recorded by me. I also appropriately credited my audios from freesound.org along with their licenses that give me the permission to use them in the sources.md file. This fulfilled the baseline criteria of having at least one audio recorded by me and one I have permission to use and also crediting them. The main challenges I faced with the project were working with audacity. It was very new to me, and my initial editing often involved following along to online tutorials. With practice I became comfortable with doing a lot of editing without having to search online how to accomplish a certain task. The main features I used throughout the project were amplify, to adjust audio volume levels, normalize, to remove distortion and background noise, fade-in and fade-out, to smoothly transition between audio clips, along with basic editing like cut, copy, paste, duplicate, and split. Something that I accidentally discovered was that I can place different audio clips on the same track, this allowed me to not scroll through too many tracks to find one audio clip that I had to align.

The final audio file in audacity looks like this. It has an audio length of 2:37 minutes, falling within the required 2-4 minutes in the baseline criteria.

You can notice the ending track being more than a minute long. This is because I split my audio narration into two files to make my work easier and not deal with too many tracks in a single file. The ending-draft.aup3 and ending-draft.mp3 are the audacity file and mp3 file of only the second part of my narrative. This portion includes only freesound.org audio clips and also the part of project that fulfills the baseline requirement of having three layers of sound overlap at least once.

Attached below is a portion of my audio. This is the moment where both the characters get out of the car. It was a milestone moment for me because I was proud of coming up with the idea and being able to implement it, thus worthy of mentioning in my reflection. It shows two car doors opening and closing to indicate two people getting out of the car. It also shows that one of the car doors opens later in time and has volume lower than the first door. This is to give a feel that the second door is farther away from the first.

A helpful portion of this project was receiving feedback from my peers. Elio listened to the second portion of the narrative and gave the following feedback.

Firstly, I was nervous about receiving feedback. Nowhere in my github repository have I mentioned what my audio narrative is about, so I was concerned if the audience would understand the story I was trying to tell but I was glad to hear Elio hear the story I am trying to narrate. One thing Elio mentioned was to pay attention to how loud each audio clip is and I couldn’t agree better. There were certain parts in my audio where the background sounds like the coyote howl was too loud and there were important parts like digging which was low in volume compared to the rest of the audio. I fixed these issues by using the amplify feature and adjusting volume of those specific parts.

Overall, this was a very exciting project and now I can proudly say I make comfortable with using audacity. I fulfilled all the baseline requirements as mentioned in this reflection along with having .mp3 file of the project in my repository and completing my work in pace with the deadlines. I met most of the aspirational criteria. The only three aspirational goals I didn’t meet were creating a sense of space, including synthesized sounds created by an automated process, and having more than three audio clips overlap. The reason for not fulfilling these requirements is simply that I didn’t need them for my narrative. I am happy how of my project has turned out.

[anayoungblut]

For my audio project, titled “Gym Talk,” I wanted to recreate an atmosphere I was familiar with. I chose to depict a gym setting in which someone begins by filling up her water bottle in a quiet space, opening the door to the gym, then checking in and having a brief conversation with a gym employee. The individual then gets ready in a locker room/cubby area and barely begins working out before she is stopped and has another short conversation with someone she recognizes from class.

For baseline criteria, I met the 2-4-minute-long time requirement. My project ended up being approximately 2 minutes and 23 seconds, which is within the required timeframe. The initial draft of my project fell just over two minutes (2:05 I believe), though I made some edits and added length at both the beginning and the end. The length I added in the beginning also made the second baseline criteria requirement clearer in my project: “Have something happen or change during the piece.” I added a scene where the main character fills up her water bottle in a quiet space and subsequently enters the noisy gym. This is marked by the opening and closing of a door as well as background “gym noise” beginning once the door is opened. This emphasis on scene change also responded to some feedback I received, shown in the screenshot below, which suggested that I make the scene change more distinct. Having the conversation with a classmate may also qualify as "something happening" since it broke up nonhuman sounds with a brief exchange.

All except for two of the sources I used were recorded by me; they are each individual clips. The sources that were obtained from an external site both came from Freesound. My sources are listed in a SOURCES.md file in my repository and use the TASL method to appropriately credit the sounds I obtained from Freesound. Both were fairly obtained using a CC BY 4.0 license. I also have all the requirements in my README.md file, including a proposal, project title, citation, and multiple reflections. My repository also has each commit of my project; I chose to commit each new one to my repo from GitHub desktop at the end of each work session to ensure that all versions were saved in multiple places in both mp3 and aup.3 formats. I also have three tracks layered multiple times in my project and occasionally have four tracks layered in meaningful ways, like towards the end when there is the gym background noise, left headphone sliding back on, headphone music coming back to full volume in both headphones, and the treadmill running.

Some other feedback (screenshot below this paragraph) I received suggested I make the ending clearer instead of simply having the audio cut out. I fixed this by having the main character put her headphones back on, music coming back to full volume in both headphones, and the sound of a treadmill turning on/the character beginning a walk. I then made both the headphone music and treadmill fade out as well as the background gym noise that ran through much of the scene end. The fade-outs are shown in a screenshot below.

Two peers commented that the locker room scene felt too dragged out and suggested cutting it down. After listening to my entire audio project again, I agreed that it tended to lull during that portion. I also listened to Dr. Miller’s in-class suggestion that realism does not have to mean real-time. I decided to cut it down so that the listener would not lose focus at that point in my narrative. Some suggested adding a conversation, but after cutting down each clip duration, I felt that any sort of meaningful conversation would be too long to fit in the shortened timeframe.

I shot for multiple instances of aspirational criteria. Audacity is an unfamiliar platform for me, so basically every effect is new. The aspirational effect I am most proud of using is the left/right pan when the main character puts her headphones on (screenshot below this paragraph). I love the effect this gives, especially when the listener is wearing headphones. I also increased the volume of both clips putting headphones on (left/right ear) to mimic how loud that sound would be in reference to headphones sitting right on a person’s ears.

Organizationally, my narrative was very clear. There was a sharp indication of scene change from outside to the character entering the gym, heard by a door opening and background gym noise beginning. My feedback also commented on the smoothness and “real time” feel of my project, which plays toward the aspirational criteria of having seamless transitions between clips. Dr. Miller suggested making the ending clearer (aspirational criteria), which I did by fading out the sounds at the end of the narrative (shown in below screenshot).

While I was nervous at the beginning, I am happy with how my audio project turned out and really enjoyed working with audio for this unit!

[josieharris1]

Prior to completing this project, I had lots of experience with video editing from various film courses at Pitt and from completing internships in digital media and design the past couple years. However, I had no experience with audio editing, so I was a little intimidated by all of the new skills I would have to pick up. To my surprise, it was a lot more similar to video editing than I thought, and I adapted quickly to tools in Audacity as I did in other video editing platforms. My narrative aims to recreate an auditory scene of myself cooling a meal in the kitchen. The sounds range between turning a gas stove on and off, chopping and sauteing vegetables, putting pots and pans on the stove, boiling water, and cooking and draining pasta. One of the most important parts of the narrative was to showcase my love for cooking by including elements that make it so enjoyable for me. Whether the listener understands that or not, it’s personal to me by including sounds of my window curtains opening, lighting a candle, and playing music on a low volume so the sound of the rain still shines through. One aspect of my narrative that improved as I revised it was the balance between foreground and background sounds. For example, instead of cutting the noise of the boiling water when moving on to chopping the vegetables, I faded the volume down to a low level so that it continued to play softly in the background. The screenshot below shows a clip of the water boiling, followed by the pasta being put in the pot and the boiling water fading out, followed by a lower track of the water boiling.

Another area of sound layering I improved was centered around the rain. To make it sound more realistic, I increased and decreased the volume of the rain as the narrative progressed or as certain cooking sounds faded in or out. For example, as the cooking noises came to a halt, I strengthened the sound of the rain, and then lowered it a little bit when I turned the speaker off. I tried not to let the rain overpower any of the sounds, but varied the volume throughout to make it sound as natural as possible.

At the end of my initial draft, I completed the narrative with the sound of the music cutting out and the speaker turning off after I finished cooking. I thought it sounded too abrupt, so I took out the sound of the speaker turning off, and slowly faded out the background music. I realized that this didn’t make much sense, which was also noted by Ben’s comment, shown in the screenshot below. At this point in the project I added the rain throughout the piece, and re-added the sound of the speaker turning off and let the rain fade out afterwards. I think the ending sounds much more natural this way, and also concludes the narrative by coming full circle with the music turning on at the beginning.

In addition to achieving a few personal goals I had for my audio narrative, I also met the baseline criteria. My narrative runs for 2 minutes and 54 seconds, meeting just about the halfway point of the shared goal. The setting of my piece moves from the living room to the kitchen, and also contains a full scene of me cooking a meal. I used a mix of originally recorded sounds and licensed sounds from Freesound to create my narrative in which I overlapped them throughout to create an authentic scene of noises from the kitchen that include many cooking activities happening at once. If I had to complete this project again, I would try to utilize more tools in audacity, such as using separate speakers for different sounds. For example, when playing the sound of the vegetables being chopped, I would have the background noise of the boiling water come out of the left speaker, to capture what I hear standing at the counter to the right of the stove.

[MikeBailey412]

For my audio narrative project, I created a day in the life. The narrative follows me throughout how I might typically spend a day on the weekend. It first starts out with me waking up to the dreaded iPhone alarm. Once I turn off the alarm I head into the bathroom to brush and shower. I kind of wish I had found a better shower sound because it might cause some confusion for the listener. The screenshot below shows the progress I made with the first scene.

Next, I added a scene of me making breakfast. I start by turning on my Keurig to make a cup of coffee. I then layered the sounds of bacon sizzling and making eggs over the Keurig to meet the baseline criteria for layering. Below is a screenshot of the finished breakfast scene.

After the scene of me making breakfast, I added the sounds of me going to the gym. I can be heard walking to the gym. Once I arrive, there’s the typical gym ambiance in the background with music and weights clanking. I get onto the treadmill for a quick workout, and then I end up walking back home. After I added the gym scene I added a scene of me playing guitar. I recently picked up guitar so I thought it would be appropriate to record me playing. In the screenshot below, both the gym and guitar scene can be seen in progress.

For the guitar scene, I originally had it to where I played two songs. Asher gave me some great feedback and suggested that I only play one song because the switch from one song to the other was too abrupt. He also suggested to maybe add some voice lines before I actually start playing so the scene is more natural. Below is a screenshot of the feedback he gave me.

In order to revise my project with this feedback, I got rid of the two songs that I originally recorded and picked another one and only added that to the scene. Also, before I start playing I added a voice line, “Alright, time to practice.” I think this line sets up the scene a little bit better and gives the listener an introduction to the scene. In addition, I ended the narrative with a fade out of the melancholy song I am playing on the guitar.

I think my project easily meets the baseline criteria. First off, the whole project comes out to three minutes and forty seconds so the time limit is met. Something “happened” in the narrative. The scene changed multiple times. I have both sounds recorded by me and multiple that I did not record but have permission to use. In my README I listed and credited all of the sounds I found on freesound.org. Again, I met the layering requirement with the breakfast scene with three sounds overlapping each other. I met all of the deadlines and requirements from the chart on the assignment page. Finally, I exported a .mp3 file named “DayInTheLife.mp3.”

[jordanmarch]

For my soundscape, “Wake Me in The Future”, I chose to take listeners through a morning in my life on a school day but with a twist. I decided to have a virtual voice assistant guide me through the motions of getting up, getting ready, getting out the door, and getting to class. However, in the end, listeners find out the futuristic reality was in fact not reality; it was all a dream, and I overslept. This was my first experience truly using an audio editor aside from messing around on garage band in middle school. My main goal was to become comfortable with the basics of Audacity and learn a few special tools and effects, which I think I achieved.

At the beginning of my soundscape, I wanted to gradually introduce the listener to the scene and make them feel like they were waking up too. The first sound is my heater turning on, which I often hear as I wake up, and this remains a constant background noise for the first half or so of the project. Then the alarm goes off, breaking the quiet atmosphere abruptly. Again, I hoped this would make the listener feel like they were waking up.

When we had to upload our draft, I struggled pushing the entire, longer files to my repository. Because of this most of the feedback I received was on my first preview, but it was still useful! One peer review suggested adding background music.

When I was first creating my narrative, I considered adding music to my walk, but decided against it because I thought it would take away from the sounds on the street. With this comment, I chose to reconsider my initial choice and added a lo-fi song when the virtual assistant asks if I want to listen to music. I tried to find a song that I actually listen to, but it was challenging to find one that I had the rights to. With this song I had it fade in and kept the audio all on the left side since I normally only wear one air pod when walking. I think the lo-fi song without words and music in one ear was the right choice because it doesn’t take away from the other essential noises, and it immerses the listener more.

Post-first-draft was when I really focused on implementing special things beyond bare-bone cutting and moving things around. I focused a lot on this at the end of the soundscape when the “walk sign is on to cross Forbes” gets all funky and I come out of the dream back to reality. I wanted listeners to feel immersed in the confusion of this moment, which I attempted to capture with the small clips fading in/out and jumping from right ear to left.

I believe I easily met all the baseline criteria. My narrative without the audio credits is about 3.5 minutes, which falls within the time requirements. I also have a mixture of sounds I recorded myself and sounds not recorded by me that I had permission to use. You can see these on my asset page where all credit is given (TASL!). Throughout a lot of my project, I have 3 or more sounds overlapping (especially at the end, as there’s a lot going on). There is also a change in location throughout my piece from my bed all the way to Forbes and an event when we realize it was a dream. I also used the fade-in and out effects from the “effects” menu quite a bit throughout the piece.

As far as aspirational criteria go, a big thing I did was change the volume and left/right pan. This was done at the beginning with the heater and the alarm, with the cat's meows getting louder as she gets closer, with the music, noises on the street, etc. I think the most unique element of my narrative and its story is the virtual, siri/alexa-esque voice assistant. I figured out how to generate this online and it fit my intended goal of it sounding like a fake voice, not a real person. I wanted it to be obvious to viewers that a real person wasn’t following me around and speaking with me and that I was in a futuristic reality.

[kellenapp]

Coming into this project, I was a little confident in my capabilities with editing audio as I have used FL studio and Pro tools prior to the class. It was, however, a little daunting to come up with a story and make the listener feel like they are a part of that story. I started off wanting to execute a car crash, where the main character is on a walk and gets hit by a car. But after some consideration, I decided this might be a little too much to try and bring to life through audio. So, I changed the story to be about two friends going grocery shopping. I knew I wanted to have them drive/take an uber, so that way there were four “settings;” their house, outside, the car, and the grocery store. Four felt like a suitable number where it is not too little but also not overcomplicated. To signify these settings ambient sound was needed, and transitions (doors mostly). The ambient sound would get louder or dim depending on where they were (ex: louder outside, quieter in the car). This is around where I imported most of the big ambient sounds for my preview.

I asked my roommate if he would help with the dialog in my narrative, he obliged so I wrote a script for us and we recorded it in our dorm, moving around so that he was the distance away that his character would be when the line was said. Getting to the actual editing, I used Pro Tools EQ and De-esser to fix up our dialog recording, I also added some fades on Pro Tools because when I tried to add a fade in/out in audacity, it didn’t let me edit the fade very much and Pro Tools allows you to actually fade between two audio clips to make the transition smoother.

I also added some other smaller audios, like the freezer door and steps. I still had not found a good car audio to use for the characters by the time of feedback, as Elio noticed there were some points missing ambient sound, and took his feedback to find a good audio where it sounded like you were actually in the car while it drove.

He also recommended that I shorten the audio file as it was over 4 minutes, which I did. Overall, I fulfilled all the requirements with my audio narrative; there are audio clips recorded by me and from freesound, I have listed credits in the readme file, the piece is between two and four minutes, and there are multiple points in the narrative where three audios overlap. I also kept up on deadlines and have the final file in my repo. I had a little bit of a tougher time with this than I expected, as stated earlier deciding what the story would be presented to be a bigger challenge than expected. I also wanted to do other things with the narrative, like include some radio music in the car scene, but I could not figure out how to make the music sound like it was coming out of a car radio from the front seat. I am, however, proud of what I have completed and enjoyed working on the project.

[eliotann99]

For my project, "No Days Off", I chose to take the listeners on a ride with a college student during a very busy school day. However, to make it more interesting, I wanted to see if I could convey a sense of urgency without using any dialogue. On the other hand, I also wanted to capture the beauty in everyday routine. Therefore, I set out to record most of the audio files instead of using stock ones so it sounds more authentic.

When developing my story, I knew that I wanted it to be a full circle. In other words, I want to start and end the story with a similar sound. At first, I thought this was going to be hard without any dialogue. That was until I had the revelation of using a yawn audio file in my project. It seems pretty natural that a person would start their day with a yawn and end it with one. Now that I have a beginning and an end, I started thinking about sounds that I hear daily whether at home or at school, and set out to record what I need.

Later on, I started editing all the files I had at hand. I originally started editing with Audacity. However, I made the decision to switch to Adobe Audition as it worked better for me. I started cutting files, using crossfade features, and arranging the files as I see fit.

However, using Adobe Audition instead of Audacity meant that my peers can't access my work when giving feedback. Nonetheless, I was able to get pretty solid feedback on my project which led me to make some revisions. This feedback mentioned using a soundtrack in the background. That wasn't something that I considered at first. But, after further thought, I came to the conclusion that adding a soundtrack in some parts could elevate the experience. So, I took some time to find a soundtrack that I thought fit the theme. Once I found it, I learned that implementing it into the story was the hard part as it required some fine-tuning so it doesn't overpower the other audio files. For example, you can see in the picture below how the bottom line goes up and down. This just means that I manually set the soundtrack to get louder and quieter as needed.

On the other hand, adding a soundtrack solved my problem of at least layering three sounds on top of each other as I haven't gotten to that at the time.

When it comes to meeting baseline criteria, I believe that I have fulfilled them. The track falls within the 2-4 minutes range, it changes locations and events multiple times, it contains at least one sound originally recorded by me, and one that isn't recorded by me, I have the credits listed on the Readme file, three layers of sound overlapping at least once, and a fully rendered mp3 file.

As for Aspirational Inspirations, I think I met a few of them. I spent time learning Adobe Audition's different effects, used the different kinds of fades offered by the software for a smoother transition between sounds, and normalized volume so that unimportant tracks don't drown out others.

[juradodiego]

Digital Nightmare By Diego Jurado

In my soundscape titled “Digital Nightmare”, I wanted to create the feeling of waking up from a nightmare. To accomplish this, I had to convey the feeling of a nightmare itself. So, I proposed the idea of a student getting home late from a night of studying and turning on their computer to keep doing work. When thunder strikes, they are sucked into their computer. I envisioned this as a void with a large glass window. So, I have the protagonist bang on the glass screaming for help, but nobody can hear him. Then, as they are feeling helpless a spirit of pure electricity whizzes by. Confusing our protagonist. He then starts to run. I imagined the floor would be metallic. Our protagonist is running and running until he is out of breath. The monster catches up and is about to consume him. He screams “No” - very horror movie like – and wakes up from his nightmare still screaming. Heavy breathing and bed sheet ruffling ensue. We hear birds chirping as the nightmare is over. At first, I thought it would be easy to convey this narrative. But I quickly realized sourcing the right sounds would be difficult. Leaving me two options: record my own or repurpose and remix the sourced sounds. I ended up doing both. In my first image, a screenshot of my project, I included a few sourced sounds with slight editing. However, I chose to use these sounds first to set up the environment, so that I could then add the “fun” stuff.

When it came time for feedback, I did not have accomplished as much as I wanted to. I received compliments on how I set up the environment nicely, but I knew the narrative portion of the soundscape was lacking.

I ended up layering several sounds on top of each other to re-create the original idea I had in my head. In the project screenshot one can see the rainstorm audio is playing consistently until the “event” happens. I imagined that the thunder strike would cause someone who is sleeping to experience some event in their dream. This is reflected in the strange digital synth playing, while the protagonist is falling into the computer.

While the project does not sound exactly how I wanted it to, given the time and resources I was able to meet all the baseline requirements of the project. If I were to continue working on it, I might re-record some of the sounds, and elaborate more on the “nightmare” portion of the narrative. I feel that incorporating more sounds to the chase would elevate the stakes – some music might help. Additionally, I think adding another segment might help establish the electricity monster as a real threat and increase suspense. Given more time I would work on my mixing skills, and make the clips go together seamlessly. I enjoyed playing around with the pan dials, especially when creating the environment. I also wanted to establish the cat as closer than the rain, so I adjusted the gain of the audios accordingly, and it came out quite nicely.

[Asher-Goods]

Soup Time is an audio narrative of a snippet of my everyday life when I get home after a day and sometimes cook food with my roommate Justin.

I started off this project by layer the background noises of my home. I was able to source all of these noises pretty easily through freesound.org. The background sounds of my house included the sound of cars passing by on the street, my HVAC unit blowing air through the apartment, Hebrew music, and my bird, Cedric screeching in the background. I used a looping effect and carefully analyzed and tweaked the start and stop of the initial HVAC clip so that it seamlessly repeated.

During my next working session, I searched for, downloaded, and added many more sources. Here you can see a file with all of the different sounds that I used throughout the project.

Additionally, I recorded my roommate and me cooking and worked on equalizing the gain and direction of the various sounds I mixed in. So far, I added us speaking, my pet bird squawking in the background, and music playing from the other side of the room, and I started mixing all of these sounds. Here is a screenshot from when I was doing this...

By then, I had completed the first draft of the project! I added many different sounds which can be found in my assets.md file. I made them fit into the audio scape so that they sounded natural by properly timing them and using techniques such as fading, equalizing, cutting, and even using a low pass filter for the music.

I then listened through multiple times and tweaked little aspects like volume. I initially had the issue of running too long (6 minutes.) So, I managed to shorten the project by fading in and out of certain parts of the conversation between me and my roommate.

During our peer review day, I received a number of comments. The main thing that seemed to stick out to me was:

1. I did a good job of making the conversation sound natural and it flowed well (even when it faded in and out)
2. Ben and Mike didn't like my arabesque music :(

After taking these comments into consideration, I thought, "Who cares? It's just a project. It doesn't necessarily need to be exactly what I and my roommate were listening to when we made soup the other day, especially if my listeners don't particularly enjoy it." So, instead of the arabesque music, I found one of my favorite songs that have been on a lot in my house recently and mixed it in. I also introduced the sound of the JBL speaker starting up so that the listeners would have a better idea of where the sound was coming from. Additionally, I used a high-pass filter and adjusted the filter curve so that it would sound more like it was coming from a speaker.

This was the end! Or so I thought... As I was pushing the final version of my project to GitHub, I received a message telling me that I was out of LFS data. So, in the meantime, I had to buy $5 worth of storage to submit this project. I hope to figure out a way to clear out some of my LFS storage in the near future though. Besides this, I am very happy with how my project turned out. I seriously feel like I am standing in my kitchen and making soup. It's very weird to think about this considering that the project is just a mod podge of a bunch of different sounds that I sourced individually!

[BenA03]

Reflection

For my narrative I created a project called “Spent on a Rainy Day”, which is intended to be an intimate and sad story about a software engineer who comes home after being recently laid off from their job.

Coming into the unit, I had some experience in Audacity from editing some music projects and podcasts (the ‘Remove Background Noise’ effect has saved me in a few spots), so I was excited to work with audio again but in a new way. I was especially inspired by Jackie Joo’s “Come Over For Dinner”, so I knew I wanted to explore left/right pan and relative volume in addition to some new Audacity effects I haven’t tried before.

Getting started

I found the early stages of this project very difficult, especially in nailing down the plot of my narrative. Initially, I wanted the story to be about each member of a family returning to their home after each of them finish their long day at work/school. However, I realized that introducing so many characters might be too ambitious, since I’d have to precisely layer the sounds of their actions together in a way that it was still clear who was performing which activity. So, I jumped to the idea of just having one character, a student, which we’d follow as they unpacked from school, grabbed a snack from the fridge, and got started on their homework. I started assembling sounds for this story, but as I drafted this plot in Audacity, I realized that my sounds were really somber: pittering rain, a quiet house. Even my sound effect for taking off shoes (tossing them onto the floor instead of gently placing them down) gave me the impression that our character was having kind of a bad day.

From there, it came to me that perhaps our character wasn’t a student at all, but rather an adult who received unusually bad news. I noticed a few recent headlines about layoffs at Google, and so I ran with the concept of a post-layoff return back at home.

Baseline requirements

I feel I satisfied all the baseline requirements pretty well. My audio finished around 2 minutes 30 seconds, which is on the shorter side but still within our 2-4 minute guideline. While I made sure to have at least one segment of audio recorded by me, I was surprised at how often I was reaching for assets online instead of creating them myself. I think it was just really convenient to pull sounds from online since there was such a large selection to choose from and contributors on freesound often had better recording equipment than I do. I was also pleasantly surprised on how well audio from different sources could mesh together with a little editing, so I don’t think the lack of self-recorded audio is necessarily a drawback of the project. These sounds are all credited in my README within my repo, which I made sure to read out a link for in the project itself.

Aspirational requirements

I was happy with the number of aspirational requirements I reached. Instead of enumerating which ones I thought I hit and which ones I didn’t (since this reflection is already getting a little long), I’ll instead share what I thought were the coolest moments within my development process:

Creating the TV

I tried out many new effects in this project that I hadn't worked with before, including repeat, inversion, compression, and reverb. One spot I used a lot of these new effects is where I built the out the audio for the TV we hear in the narrative. I wanted the TV to sound distant from the character and a little staticky, so I joined together a handful of TV programs in Audacity, bridged by a radio static sound effect I found on freesound, and then compressed and reverbed this audio to make it sound "less perfect". I then exported this audio into my main project, where I layered sounds of a TV remote, eating potato chips, and the text conversation our character has with his friend.

Using the Envelope Tool

I also tried out the Envelope Tool for the first time. I realized that the sound of the TV was drowning out the text conversation, and I needed a way to "duck" the sound of the TV discretely so it was still playing but both activities could be easily heard and then return at a louder volume when the text conversation was over. Fade-outs and fade-ins in audacity, which I was familiar with, start the audio at 0 or move the audio to 0, so I needed to find a new way to manage this effect. Google pointed me to the envelope tool, and I thought it worked great!

Taking off the shoes

I found this great audio clip of someone taking off their shoes on freesound, and I wanted to edit it so you could hear which shoe was being taken off at that moment based on where the sound was most prominent. To do this, I decided to split the stereo audio into two mono tracks. I then slightly amplified the sound in the ear on the same side the shoe was being dropped, so it sounded like our character took off his left shoe and then his right.

Peer feedback

I also made an effort to incorporate peer feedback into my project. I was really happy to see that my peer reviewers were on the same page with what was happening in the story, especially since I had bounced between many ideas to start my project, and when I finally settled on a story, I wanted to avoid explicitly stating that my character had just lost their job; this is something I wanted the audience to infer between the characters mood, the programs on the “TV”, and the fragments of a text conversation we get within the soundscape.

I agreed with Josie's comment that my ending did sound a little sudden, and so I decided to include a quick fade-out at the end. In a way, I wanted the ending to be distressing and abrupt, since I thought this best reflected the mental state of the character at this moment, but I agreed the sudden cutoff of the very loud rain sounded more like a mistake than an intentional choice and didn't give the listener a clear indication that the narrative was supposed to end there.

Conclusion

Overall, I like how the project turned out, and I feel like I’ve become even better with Audacity. If I were to change anything, I think the audio could be lengthened a bit to allow time for some more sounds and emotions to be conveyed.

[lks50]

For this assignment I attempted to portray the stressful morning of a student's life before an exam, in a voiceless manner. I believe that I was not only successful in meeting the baseline criteria, but I also achieved some aspirational goals that the class established. This was my first time working with Audacity so every effect I used was new to me. My narrative not only presents a shift in location, but also a shift in mood. The majority of the sounds portray a sense of anxiety and stress, but signaled by the deep breath in and out, the demeanor of the subject changed to become more confident. I also used sharp cuts to signal scene changes. For example, I cued the end of the walk to class, and arrival at the destination, with a quick transition to footsteps rushing up a staircase and opening a door. I also feel confident that my audio narrative strongly correlates to a visual story. When I was collecting my assets, I realized I had forgotten to include some sounds in my list because they seemed so minimal. However, I realized that every little detail- the sound of sitting in a chair, turning on a lamp, zippering a backpack, etc.- is crucial to the visualization of the story. Therefore, I added every sound, no matter how small, to establish a thorough sequence of events.

I incorporated fade in/fade out effects of my layered tracks and adjusted the amplification of sounds to signal distance and movement. For example, I layered the coffee making sound that I recorded with the sound of sipping the coffee and placing the mug down. I added a fade out effect for the coffee making sound just before the sip of coffee played to signal the person moving away from the machine and returning to the bedroom to study.

The above screenshots show how I adjusted the sound, walking on a noisy street, to fade in and out at a normalized volume. Most students live within at least a 10 to 15 minute walk from campus. Therefore, in order to make my 2 to 4 minute narrative realistic, unable to show the walk in its entirety, I needed to find another way to show the passing of time in the same setting. Dr. Miller suggested in his composing advice, based on proposals, to fade out from the same background track back to itself. I first used the volume normalization effect to bring the longitudinal waves to a more comfortable level. Then, I went to the fading option and chose to crossfade the tracks with the alternating out/in fade direction. The volume was not as low as I was hoping for the fade out/fade in, so I selected that portion of the wave and changed the amplification of the sound.

I noticed Ariana’s comment, and agreed that adding background music would be an effective way to layer tracks while bringing in another dimension to my narrative. I didn’t want the music to take away from any other sounds, so I decided to use a song to signal the start of the exam. I used a short fade in effect to overlap Peter Sanberg’s song, Dismantle, with the sound of pencil writing. Ariana’s suggestion also helped me determine how to intentionally end the story and give closure to the audience. I think that incorporating just one sound cued the audience to realize this new effect signaled the end to the piece. The song faded out right before I thanked the audience and directed them to my asset list.

[michaelpacifico]

For my audio narrative "Dentist Visit" I wanted to replicate the feeling that someone might have when the go for a regular check-up at their dentist and how the atmosphere and environment might play out for you. I kind of wanted the feel to me reminiscent of like a very mellow afternoon where your nothing really chaotic is happening around you, but it isn't completely silent. I wanted the listener to feel like they were sitting on the shoulder of the person going in for the check-up and is just soaking in the environment that they were in.

In my first attempt, I tried making sure that I have a foundation of audio that would be the guiding piece through out the audio narrative, I decide to make sure that there was a good chunk of conversations happening in the audio to make sure that the listener doesn't get lost whenever the person is moving throughout the dentist office/space. Accompanied with some sounds such as footsteps, the sounds of chair cushions, clocks ticking, music, etc. I tried to replicate a foundation of noises that you might here at your own dentist's office.

This first attempt I tried used a workflow of arranging my audio pieces within Adobe Premiere Pro, and then using the Adobe's built-in extension for work to edit the audio in Adobe Audition, then having it transferred back to Premiere Pro and arranged in the timeline space seen in the picture above. Although I feel bad that I didn't use Audacity for this project, I've just used the Adobe Creative Suite for so long (5+ years), primarily with Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Audition that I felt I could best create an audio narrative that I wanted with the skills and knowledge that I was familiar with, instead of trying to relearn skills on a similar platform.

For my second attempt, I knew that have everything running through Premiere Pro, which is a primarily video-focused editing tool with audio elements to help, wouldn't be the most idea way of going through with the project so I ported everything into Adobe Audition solely so that I was at the very least using software that was geared at audio only. In the picture seen above, it essentially is the same as the first example photo, but I added more sounds to help with environment feel, cleaned up the audio that I made to help differentiate the characters being played, and faded out the audio towards the end to give off a feel that the person getting the clean-up was dosing off to sleep to end the audio narrative.

From the feedback, I was told that the audio around 2:18, it cuts off and doesn't have anything else except music for like another minute, this was from the work on the first attempt, when my audio was incomplete and I didn't add a final piece of audio to finish, but I fixed that for the second part. Overall, I think I got a B+ from my effort and hopefully learn for some minor editing mistakes.

[bst20]

For my audio narrative I decided to create a fictional piece that is fun and mystical while also being somewhat eerie and up for interpretation. My main source of inspiration was Alice in Wonderland as I wanted the listener to feel emersed in this peaceful meadow and then drawn into something mysterious happening in the woods. I especially tried do this with the way I ended the audio narrative with the sounds of the animal screeching tied with an aggressive apple eating sound and the psychedelic music. While I'm trying to imply that something bad has happened to the character in the story, I opted to leave the ending up for interpretation rather that clearly say what has happened to add to the overall eerie and mysterious nature of the story. Furthermore, I chose to have my piece be fictional given that I have had some experience in the past with audio editing but wanted to really challenge myself with this particular project and give my self room to experiment with different editing techniques and ways of audio storytelling. Prior to this class I had taken an audio storytelling class but the content of that class was pretty straightforward and was mostly only non-fiction. So with this project I wanted to stray from some of the audio constraints of non-fiction and create a piece with more depth and creativity to it. With this in mind I played around with various different editing techniques such as adding reverb, reversing certain audio clips, overlapping and fading music into each other and also playing with distance. Here's a screenshot of where I reversed an audio clip to add a more creepy element to the story. The sound I reversed was the animal screeching sound, which was already creepy to begin with but I found that having it in reverse added an extra layer of creepiness.

In terms of changes and edits I made I actually found the feedback I received from my peers very helpful and changed a significant chunk of my audio narrative. In particular the first draft of my audio project that I submitted had a full minute and a half of no real action and just peaceful meadow and rain sounds. Along with this my ending was rather rushed as noted by one of my peers. So through implementing their advice I cut down about a minute of the beginning which gave me space to add more depth to the ending with more sounds to indicate what is actually going on.

In cutting down much of the unnecessary filler sound I had in the beginning of the project I was able to play around more with the different sound elements I had at the ending. In particular I added the sound of a heartbeat to make the audio story sound more intense and add suspense to the situation so that the listener can feel more fully immersed in the story. This can be seen through the screen shot below where I also added a faint music box sound to further make the story more creepy. Prior to adding this music I had the meadow track play throughout which initially felt very boring and just dragged on especially when the animal in the woods emerged. So by adding this music and cutting out another chunk of the meadow sounds I was able to make the narrative feel more engaging and present a diverse array of audio elements.

Overall I'm generally pleased with the semi-final product of this audio narrative especially given that the process of creating it taught me a lot. While the concept of my story is quite simple the actual audio editing is what made it complex, as I had to balance a ton of different audio tracks and find a way to fit them together without making the whole thing sound overwhelming---which was a bit of a challenge especially given that I had more than 20 audio tracks. I also learned a lot about the editing platform itself (Audacity) which I had never previously used. Lastly I believe my project meets all the baseline requirements and quite a few of the additional aspirational elements of the project.

[skygel]

For my audio narrative project, I decided to tell the story of my morning when I am getting ready to leave the house. The narrative follows chronological order as I go through my morning and what I do to get ready for the day. I used a relatively equal mix of free audio from online sources along with audio that I recorded myself. This was my first time working with and editing audio so there was a learning curve. It also did take me some time to learn how to operate Audacity. I did figure out how to do some things like changing different audio track volumes and how to add effects to different audio clips. That being said I think that I met all of the baseline requirements for this project. My audio narrative fit into the 2–4-minute range that was required for the assignment. As I mentioned before I used several different sounds throughout the project, some originally recorded by me, and some that were found online that I have permission to use. My narrative also included scene shifts throughout the audio, along with having three layers of soundtracks overlapping at one point. I was also sure to include a credit file with the correct citations along with meeting deadlines and requirements. Looking through the aspirational requirements I don’t think that I met many of them. Although if I go back to work on the project in the future, I would spend my time adding things to the audio to meet the aspirational requirements. Throughout the project when editing my project, I spend a lot of time adjusting the timing of the audio clips and making sure that everything flowed well. When looking at my progress screenshots they all look like I used the same audio throughout working on my project. The editing process included more fine-tuning and slight changes that are not super noticeable in my progress screenshots.

When revising my audio narrative after peer reviews I drew several different parts of different comments people made. One of the things I tried to do was make smoother transitions between clips. Someone said, “For example, I would somehow smooth the transitions between clips. With the way, they currently are, it is very jarring and makes it difficult to immerse yourself.”. I tried to spend some time adjusting the timing of different audio clips and moving things around so that they flowed more easily and became easier to listen to, I also overlapped some audio clips slightly to accomplish this. It was also recommended to add a fade to all of the clips and make everything fade together and flow better, I did try and spend some time researching how to do that and I could not figure it out. If I went back and revised this project that is something I would try and spend time doing. Someone also said, “also it sounded like there were two toilet flushes which while maybe intentional sounds a bit awkward. overall great work though!”. That is also something that I went back and edited and changed the toilet flush.

[altrnate]

Please see the README.md file on my repository for my complete reflection.

[jannawohl]

I have uploaded my reflection to my repository, but I am also uploading it here: