I connected one of my Daily Creates with an audio assignment here. Partly to save time, but mostly because I had a hard time remembering something that makes me sick. Because I was working on Audio Assignment 351, I thought I could take a screenshot of the spam I was reading and post it as a photo. A good idea, except that the screenshot didn’t look very nice, so I decided to edit it using Pic Monkey. Then I got carried away a little.

And here is the recording:

Bonus track – Reverend Connor Strikes Again

For Audio Assignment 466 I created my own alarm clock. The goal was to use sounds around us (no music, no voice). I am not one of those people who wake up easily and there are very few sounds that don’t irritate me early in the morning. However, I remembered the recording of nightingales I made last spring when I was in my holiday house in the country. My first idea was to use them to help me fall asleep, but instead they just woke me up even more. So, reassigning them to their new role was a logical thing:

cc licensed ( BY NC ND )  flickr photo shared by Sergey Yeliseev

For Audio Assignment 152 I created my own ringtone. I used Roc by Aviary, which lets you create your own music. The drums I chose all come from the African Percussion section:

Roc is easy to use, especially if you watch the tutorial first. If you decide to play with Roc (it is highly addictive), you will find out that, due to its repetitive nature, Roc “music” is suitable for ringtones and alarm clocks.

I like this assignment because of its practical purpose. Whether you decide to actually use the ringtone or not, you will have good fun.

In this assignment, we were supposed to tell a story using sound effects only. I decided to create a ghost story. Here it is:

I used FindSounds to look for the effects, then I pasted them together in Audacity.

I like the way this can be used in an EFL classroom. It is great for practicing past tenses, or simply as a creative writing assignment. In pairs or groups, students could first discuss what they think is happening in the story, then write their story. The accent should be not on “getting it right” (i.e. what the teacher wanted to say), but on the students’ creativity.

What do you think has happened in my story?

Here we are in Week 5 in Camp Magic MacGuffin and now we are working with audio. I was afraid I would find the tasks too difficult by now, but I am still coping. What I learnt in my podcasting EVO course last winter has come in really handy here. I did have a lot of technical issues with the first assignment and I still don’t understand why.

This assignment is about creating a bumper for DS106 radio. I recorded my voice in Audacity and exported the file to LAME. This part worked fine. Then I added some music to it. When I tried to export the new file, Audacity reported an error and couldn’t export the file. I ended up with Audacity’s own .aup file which was completely useless as I was unable to find any other program that would convert .aup to .waw or .mp3. What I did in the end was use Myna to create a new bumper. I still don’t know why I have this problem.

Anyway, here is my bumper:

When it comes to the radio, I am a complete amateur. I don’t know whether a radio bumper is supposed to sound like that, but I kind of like when people on the radio talk to me in an honest and simple way, as if I were one of them. That’s why I didn’t use any effects to alter my voice.

I hope I will have better luck with other audio assignments, but this problem with Audacity is still puzzling me.  It seems to happen every time I try to export audio that is a mixture of music and speech (could it be the fact that it is also a mixture of mono and stereo?). The problem is new, but it seems to be here to stay. Any ideas what might be going on?