Audacity support

You can find general guidance around using Audacity at the beginning of lesson 3. Ensure you are familiar with those basics before this lesson.

 

Introduction

In this lesson the students will be combining a range of sound editing skills that they used last week, to create a fake answer phone message. 

It should sound like you, ringing home and leaving a message to explain why you are stuck in an interesting location and why you are going to be late home, all with the help of some creative sound editing! The students can be really creative with this activity and use their imagination to think of some interesting excuses, we’re sure they’ll be good at that part! 

 

The answerphone message

The first step is to record the answerphone message that you’d hear as you call up a number and nobody answers. This is pretty short and easy and will be along the lines of: “Please leave a message after the tone”. The students can do this themselves or swap with a partner and do each other’s recordings, so they don’t have the same voice all the way through. 

Whether they use their own voice or a partner’s, they may then want to adjust the pitch of the recording to disguise it. They should highlight the clip using the select tool, and go to Effect > Change Pitch:

 

 

The end of the message you hear is usually marked with a beep, so you know when to leave your message. A folder of sound effects for you to use with this activity can be found here. Download the whole folder of sounds and copy and paste them into a folder on your shared area that the students will be able to access in the lesson. Log in as a student before the lesson and check they have network permissions to open files from that location. 

In the folder of sound effects is a short ‘beep’ sound effect. Import this into your Audacity project (File > Import audio) and then use the Move tool to place it in the correct place on the timeline, after the answerphone opening. 

 

Location sounds

Next, have a listen to some of the background location sound effects with the students. Think, where could you be stuck and why will you be late? 

 

 

Are you...

• Stuck on the bus in the countryside, surrounded by a herd of cows?
• Lost in the city because you fell asleep on the train and missed your stop?
• Stranded by the seaside because the car broke down?
• Or something else entirely?! 

 

When you have chosen a location it’s time to record your excuse message that relates to the location. Some background noise is inevitable when recording in a busy classroom, so tell them not to worry about this too much, but also to be mindful and considerate of those next to them, i.e. not speaking to people when they are trying to record, taking it in turns to record with people close by and waiting quietly. 

The message might be something like this:

 

“Hi Mum, it’s me, I’m afraid I’m going to be a bit late home. You’re not going to believe this. I got on the bus as normal, but there were roadworks and a closed road so we’ve been sent on a diversion out of town and now we’re on some country lane where a herd of cows have got out of their field and are blocking all the traffic! We’re surrounded by them! you can probably hear them (“moooo”). I can just see the farmer coming on his tractor so hopefully he’ll get rid of them and we’ll get moving soon, but I’m going to be home late for tea, sorry! I’ll let you know when I get off the bus. Byeee.”  

 

When you’ve finished the message, move it to the correct place, after the beep sound effect. 

Then we need to add the background location sound effect that matches what your excuse message. For the example above the countryside effects would work well. Import the sound clip and use the move tool to position it in line with your excuse message. The two clips will also need to be the same length, so either trim the background sound effect down or copy and paste a second copy on the timeline (and trim that down) if your voice message is longer. 

 

Extra sound effects  

The next step is to add some more sound effects specific to your excuse message. So for the example above we could search for cows mooing, car horns, tractor engine sounds. 

Below are two great sources for royalty free sound effects. 

The BBC have made a wonderful and huge collection of their sound effects available at: sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk. It’s really easy to use, just search for keywords and download the clips you want to your computer. Occasionally this site doesn’t load very well on very old computers or out of date web browsers, but if this is the case, other alternatives are available. 

 

 

Find Sounds should work on any computer and also has a very good selection of clips: Findsounds.com

 

Type in keywords in the search box:

 

 

Whichever source the students use, show them how to save clips and to ensure that they know which folder they are saving to as they will need to find the clips again to import them into Audacity. 

Import your sound effects and use the Move tool to place them in the correct position, try and get them to fit with the excuse message you have recorded. You can copy and paste a clip if you want to repeat it, for example, if you wanted lots of cows mooing! 

 

 

Editing together sounds and adjusting levels

The final step is to ensure that all the volume levels are correct. The spoken voice is obviously the most important element and that should be clear and audible all the way through. The other layers should be adjusted so they can be heard but so they don’t overpower the main voice message. 

Ask the students to listen right through their whole piece of work a few times and adjust the volume of each layer as needed. 

 

Exporting the finished advert

Finally they should save their work as an Audacity project file (as they should also do regularly throughout the process: File > Save project as) and then they should export their work as a .WAV file (File > Export > as WAV) 

 

Plenary

At the end of the lesson, ask the children to copy and paste their finished WAV file onto the shared area and listen to a few with the whole class, asking for feedback from the class. 

Ask:

• What have they done well?
• Have they got the clips in the right order?
• Have they got the volume levels right for each clip?
• Did they choose appropriate sound effects?
• Did they use the right amount of sound effects?
• Is there anything that could improve it?