Vader Answering Machine

[soundcloud params=”auto_play=false&show_comments=true”]http://soundcloud.com/mbransons/vader-answering-machine[/soundcloud]

Preparing for the audio portion of ds106, I decided to create a new assignment, “Movie Voice Machines.” This idea was inspired by a Tim Owens blog post, “This American Life Sex Tape,” which talked about an awesome audio riff on the amazing audio storytellers from This American Life. For Movie Voice Machines you are to create a voice machine message for a character of the movies. Here’s an example of a Cheech and Chong answering machine message.

Voice machines are for the most part an obsolete technology today, but people used to work really hard to create imaginative voice machine messages with music, sound effects and of course their message.

Also this was my first time using Audacity to create any sort of sound work. I followed a couple tutorials from here for setup, and here for basic editing. I’ve used professional tools like ProTools for some time a few years ago, but Audacity was really straight forward and don’t mind really using it.

Here is the list of samples I downloaded and used from freesound.org.

am beep.wav by NoiseCollector
Tape Recorder.wav by Pogotron
OutwardBound.flac by acclivity

For Darth Vader’s voice I added a few of the effects you can find in Audacity, including a pitch shifter and a chorus filter. Finally for the Imperial March music, I played back a sample from Youtube and recorded it from my laptop speakers into the microphone using Audacity. This intentionally degraded the quality of the recording so it sounded like Vader was playing back from an old cassette player into the microphone of an answering machine.

I’m planning to make my own tutorial for Audacity, showing how this was created. And looking forward to some ds106 radio later!

 


Posted

in

by

Comments

10 responses to “Vader Answering Machine”

  1. GNA Avatar

    This is brilliant. It had me laughing in concept stage. I really like the do-over, it makes it even more real. Rocking and ruling MBS!

  2. mome Avatar

    Haha this is both cool and really interesting. It’s funny that you used Darth Vader though because I just submitted another Vader themed assignment in a different category (http://yeowtuj.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-mashups-and-vaders.html) 😛

    1. mbransons Avatar

      Loved the Vader Triple Troll. Great reinvention of the assignment.

      1. mome Avatar

        Thanks!

        I just took another look at this post though, and realised that you creating this assignment was also influenced by another blog post. We’re all unintentionally “paying it forward” huh? Makes me wonder if my assignment will in turn lead to new ones popping up on ds106… 😀

  3. […] See what Michael provided for that Vader dude with the breathing problem. […]

  4. nickg Avatar

    Hey Professor Smith how were you able to get the soundcloud clip to view like that on the site? I’m trying to do on my site but it just shows the link and not the play or pause picture like yours.

  5. nickg Avatar

    Never mind I figured it out.

    1. mbransons Avatar

      Glad to hear it! Can’t wait for the post.

  6. […] files to use. Here are links to a couple of tutorials (setup & basic editing) I used to create my first sound project using Audacity. There is also an Audacity manual published as a […]