A sound is something that is heard. Listening is an activity.

Sound design is fine-tuning the message your audience will sense. Sound may be buried in the message and only noticed if it is ever taken away. Sound may be the message. Without it we limit the use of one of our most receptive senses. Naturally, certain tones are conveyed by using certain sounds that ultimately communicate a message. It will be up to you to determine what you want to say and how you want to say it through the design of sound.

Below is a list of five words. Each student must compose sound from a sample or recorded means or a combination of both that communicates each word. Listen critically to how different sounds portray different messages. Each sound should be exactly ten seconds in length, exported as .mp3 files. We will play each .mp3 one at a time through the QuickTime player. Do not use music.

The words to use are:

Soft
Global
Digital
Speed
Mournful

Details. Five, ten-second .mp3 files.

Each file should be labeled with the corresponding sound names as well as students’ initials followed with .mp3 (for instance soft_studentinitials.aif). Place the files in a folder labeled “sound_studentslastname” and burn it to a CD labeled with your first and last name as well as “Sound.” Be prepared to load the files onto the presentation computer at the beginning of class.

Grading

Audio: 100%. Student demonstrated the ability to record, import, edit, compose, and export .aif files. Student also demonstrated an appropriate, clear, and memorable solution to the given problem. Level of finish and technical craft achieved.

Progress Crit = Nov 17

Download Audacity

Download .mp3 encoder for Audacity

Download Sound Flower

I can’t say anything this song doesn’t say brilliantly. Comedian Adam Buxton takes on the Radiohead remix contest with his own entry, which cuts through the hype brings a bit of wit to TV incidental music and remixing alike. And, really, how often do you get to say “Radiohead” and “rap” in the same sentence? Take my mechanical rights, please!

See, there, I said something. It wasn’t very good. Just so listen to the song and thank me later, okay?

See also Adam Buxton’s sketch for BBC3’s Rush Hour which cleans up NWA to “Help Da Police.”Thanks, Jaymis!

 

From Create Digital Music

They guys who started it all.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.  It’s peculiar character too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessing mine; as he who lights a taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813

Post title by Flavor Flav of Public Enemy on the track “Caught, Can We Get a Witness” on the Album “It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back”