Sound studio

Silence, and sameness, sound a lot longer in playback than they do when you're recording them. Two seconds of nothing could be considered a Grand Pause. Think about how you would write a scene with words: you don't include every moment, every breath, every footstep; you just say, "The doorbell rang, and she opened the door." Similarly, in movies or TV, frequent cuts from one shot to another are the rule, and long takes are the exception. Feel free to elide some moments in time!

If you're worried about signaling how long something takes, consider fading out a background track and fading right back in to a later point in that track.

Many of you are doing smart work to differentiate foreground sounds from background, in part through "ducking" the background to a lower volume while keeping the sound going to provide depth. Similarly, many of you are doing smart work using left/right channels to differentiate speakers or to move things around the landscape.

If you haven't yet tried either, go for it! The left/right channels are visible at the left of any track, as long as the track's tall enough. You can adjust the track's overall volume with the gain slider also located there. Alternately, you can use the Envelope Tool to reversibly change volume for just part of the track.

Two caveats: First, if you're listening to someone way off to your left, you'll probably turn to face them, at least part of the way. So you probably don't need to go all the way to 100% left or 100% right when positioning human voices: try 50% and fine-tune from there.

Second, one risk of layering sounds is "clipping," the kind of crackle or squeal you get if the sound level exceeds what the system can handle. This can especially happen as you layer these sounds together, or amplify them to bring them closer to the listener. If you notice any one waveform hitting the top of the track, or the overall volume going into the red during playback, you're "clipping" part of your sound. Try Effects > Clip Fix, which should give you a little more room.

Even if your narrative takes place somewhere you wouldn't expect music to actually be audible, a low-key background soundtrack offers a lot of benefits: it covers transitions that would otherwise be silent; it masks differences in background noise across assets and thus helps them seem more like they belong together; and, as we noted when we started this unit, music is great a signaling (or shifting) emotional tone.

Be sure to check out the Sounds and Music section of the Resources page for tips on where to find openly licensed tracks you can use.

Endings are tricky. In an essay, I'd say they usually depend on beginnings: completing some thought you'd left open, or answering a question. In stories, there's often an epiphany (new insight) or a denouement, a return to a previous situation but with the characters' perspectives on it now changed. You can try those things with audio, too, but there are added elements: if you have music, you can make sure to "resolve" back into the root chord, or to complete a rhythmic sequence; if you have an ongoing event, you can fade out; if you have a surprise or joke ending, you can signal intentionality by muting almost all the backgrounds to draw attention to the one track that remains.

There are lots of ways to do this. But if you're satisfied with the overall shape, endings are one place where you can put a little extra polish in!

If you're using sounds someone else recorded, be sure to include enough information to recover where it came from. (See Writer/Designer page 162, and the Creative Commons' own recommendations.)

If you're using source material with a Creative Commons license, you do need to specify *which* license it uses: CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, etc. This is especially important for Share-Alike licenses (CC-BY-SA, etc), because they force you to use the same license and can therefore be in conflict with each other. You can add this information at the end of the audio file, like in Coffee Cart Conversations, or you can use that space after your narrative ends to point listeners toward a text file in your repository.

Note as well that any kind of CC-BY license requires you to say who made the source, not just say that it has a CC-BY license. (That's what the BY means.) Nor is it enough to give a link to the search engine or database that you found it with: point to the specific page for the individual file you're using.