In this two-part activity you will try to create a short story out of just sound effects (no dialogue), the [DS106 Sound Effect Story assignment](http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/sound-effects-story/). To prepare for this, you can start trying to find or record five or more sounds you can piece together for a story. What can you tell in five sounds?
[Here is a sample story.](https://soundcloud.com/a_motley92/sound-story)
#####Part 1: Find or record sounds you can edit together to create a story
The story can be about a project you are working on, or an accomplishment, or something related to a research project you may be engaged in (or just use sounds related to one of your personal interests).
You can either record sounds or find ones that are licensed for reuse. Some places to find sounds include:
- Freesound (free but you need to create an account to download)
- McCauley Library (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) offers wildlife sounds.
- public domain sounds shared and recorded by people around the world.
- SoundBible free sound effects
- SoundTransit field recordings
- Wikimedia Commons Sounds by Type
#####Part 2: Create your story
In part 1, we suggested recording or finding sounds you can use to edit to a single piece; something that might introduce your eportfolio or web site readers to the environment of the place you work. The story can be about a project you are working on, or an accomplishment, or something related to a research project you may be engaged in (or just uses sounds related to one of your strong interests).
If you have not gathered sounds, see above for links to some resources.
Assemble the clips in Audacity to tell a story. Use multiple tracks so you can overlap as needed, and or use fade in / fade out so there are no abrupt changes. Think about using an ambient sound as a background. The basic steps for doing this (and some useful things to know about Audacity) [are shown here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTw9ZwL0CTA) (40 mins) and as well in [this screencast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfVKSx7WtY) (15 mins).
Here is one such example done for a [school project](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-7eekV9gPc)
And you can find many more as responses to the DS106 Sound Effects Story assignment.
Upload your final audio (exported as MP3) to [SoundCloud](http://soundcloud.com) and then you can embed the sounds just by pasting it’s SoundCloud URL into a blank line of your editor (other blog platforms can use the SoundCloud HTML embed code).
When you paste your URL like this
~~~
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You get an embedded SoundCloud player like at the bottom of this post.
#####Blog
Once you have uploaded your audio to SoundCloud, create a new post with your story embedded and tell us about the process you went through to create the story. Where did you find the audio files? What challenges did you have to work through? what would you do differently next time?
#####Categories for this post:
* TWU Online
* Digital Literacy
* Sound Effect Story’.