My first audio assignment for this week was the “DS106 Radio Bumper” Assignment (1.5 stars). I decided to do it since we have our radio shows this week and next week and we need some bumpers for them! I didn’t do this assignment in the previous audio week because I liked a lot of the other ones so I figured I’d save it for later. This was a little harder than I expected, mostly because I am a perfectionist.

First, here it is:

I decided to go with static because it reminds me of the opening credits of The Wire and I knew I wanted it to be a simple bumper so I just went with the normal “DS 106 Radio.”

How I did it:

I used FreeSound to get the sounds that I needed. I searched for static, a boing sound, and background static. I imported all of these sounds into Audacity so that I could edit them. I then searched for a free text-to-speech site which I could download from. I was very picky at this stage in the game because I wanted the speech to sound natural. I tried several different sites but ended up settling for this one. I am happy with how the speech turned out. I downloaded it and imported that into Audacity as well. I also had to mess with what I typed in. First I tried “D S 1 0 6 Radio” but they said “one-zero-six.” Then I tried “D S 106 Radio” but they said “one-hundred six.” So finally I tried “D S 1 o 6 radio” and that is what I ended up going with. Some of the text to speech things made the “oh” sound funny and that’s why I had to be picky.

Then I cut and moved the tracks around until they sounded right and fit together well. I cut out a lot of stuff from three of the tracks (the sound ones) because I knew my bumper was going to be short. Then I put it all together, saved the Audacity file, and exported it as an MP3. I tried to upload it to Twitter, the Hub, and SoundCloud via Known but for some reason it didn’t upload to SoundCloud so I had to do that separately.