For audio week during #prisoner106, one of the assignments we were asked to do was to create a morning announcement for the Village like in The Prisoner.
Since I’m the Village Philosopher, mine had some philosophical content. Do you know the Ship of Theseus?
The process
I wanted this to sound like it was coming over a radio or through a loudspeaker, so I didn’t want a “clean” voice sound like I usually do. Time to use the crappy phone mic and speaker! I recorded the voice parts on some built-in recorder app on my phone (can’t remember what it was), and then I played that through the phone speaker while holding it near my laptop built in mic and recorded it into Audacity. Two crappy mics and one crappy speaker and voilà.
I wanted to do the same thing with the “technical difficulties” clip, but that would be a bit harder. I recorded that from my system audio using Soundflower. So it went straight into Audacity from there. I would have had to then record it on my phone from my laptop, then back into the laptop using the same procedure as above. I decided to just let that go and have it not sound like it was coming through the loudspeaker.
BTW, here are a couple of sites I found useful when I had to try to remember how to use Soundflower (I didn’t remember):
- Basics: http://osxdaily.com/2013/02/25/record-system-audio-mac-os-x-soundflower/
- How to still be able to hear your system audio while you’re using Soundflower to record it: http://www.macworld.com/article/1159440/soundflower_capture.html
I recorded the Rover sound using Soundflower as well, while watching The Chimes of Big Ben on the Prisoner106 archive. I then uploaded that Rover sound into a #prisoner106 sound collection that Melanie Barker started, that we can all use and contribute to.
The Rover sound from that episode has music in parts of it, though, and I didn’t want the music, so I had to cut and paste parts of the Rover sequence into my audio file. I tried and tried to make the two parts fit together smoothly, but it just wasn’t working. So I gave up and there’s an obvious jump between parts of the Rover sequence. But hey…who said Rover’s noise had to be smooth?
Sounds
Mostly made by me, except:
Birds sound is licensed CC0 from freesound.org, but in case anyone wants to find it (or in case I want to find it again), here it is: http://freesound.org/people/sphion/sounds/158527/
Technical difficulties voice sound was made from here: http://onlinetonegenerator.com/voice-generator.html
The Village announcement chime came from the Prisoner106 archive.
Update:
At the end of this broadcast Rover got me, and I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital. And I saw this. What could they possibly be doing to my legs?!