Digital / Gamed Life Sound Effect Story

Create a short story with no dialogue or narration, using only sound effects and music.

The goal here is to express a story about our course theme of This Digital Life or about our current topic of Games and Gaming. Your story should include 5-10 different sounds, and at least one used as a “background” sound to create a setting. Include at least one sound that you create and record into Audacity. Use layering of sounds to create a fuller experience.

Using Audacity

• Download Audacity
• installing LAME plugin that allows you to export sound to MP3 file format
• Audacity Manual

A few more suggested tools for audio editing include:

• SoundCloud Create an account at Soundcloud.com to upload and host your audio- think of it as a YouTube for sound. Once published on there you can embed a player for your audio in a blog or share easily as a link.
• CloudConvert Audio files can come in a wide variety of formats; you may need this free web tool to convert sound files to ones Audacity can import (AIFF, WAV, or MP3 are best).
• Freesound You will find sources of sound effects all over the place; our favorite is Freesound where all audio is open licensed, meaning you can use them without worry of copyright issues. You need to create an account to download audio files.
• Incompetech Music Again, you can find many places online to find music. We strongly urge you to use sources where the music has been licensed to be reused; Composer Kevin McLeod shares a huge library of instrumental tracks that are useful for audio editing projects.

Planning Your Story

Start by creating an outline of the sounds you think would work to express your idea. Write it down! For some inspiration see the responses to this kind of assignment from DS106.

Keep track and list all sources of sound files that were download from the internet. Include in your response or blog post a screenshot of your Audacity editing file.

When done, export your story as an MP3 and upload it to SoundCloud; use the link from there to use as your web address in your response.

Demo Story

In this demo, my idea is to think of a life as a game. I want to use as a background sound either some computer generated game music or maybe the sounds of an arcade. The “game” starts with a coin drop or a button press, and progresses through a series of sounds representing different parts of life. All of these I will look to download from Freesound. Keep track of the sources of all sounds you download and use for your project.

The sound I will record will be the end, where I will breathe, than gasp, and leave silence. It will end with the restart sound from the old PacMan game when a player is “killed” by a ghost but returns for more play.

The sounds I found were mostly from Freesound; the “gasp” is my own recording. These are the sources:

Arcade Music Loop https://freesound.org/people/joshuaempyre/sounds/251461/

Dropping Coins https://freesound.org/people/1histori/sounds/412906/

Crying newborn baby child 3.WAV https://freesound.org/people/the_yura/sounds/211527/

Kids in classroom https://freesound.org/people/laserlife/sounds/361400/

party.mp3 https://freesound.org/people/winsx87/sounds/152026/

Ambience – Busy office-call center.wav https://freesound.org/people/dnlburnett/sounds/335711/

Wedding Bells https://freesound.org/people/Maurice_J_K/sounds/346941/

Pac Man Sounds http://www.classicgaming.cc/classics/pac-man/sounds

All editing was done in Audacity, here is a screenshot of my editing interface:

Example for "Digital / Gamed Life Sound Effect Story":
https://soundcloud.com/felixadog/the-game-of-life