Do It Now!

I have to admit this became more of a dabbling with “found sounds” rather than what I’d think normally as working with sound effect clips. But I couldn’t help myself as I really enjoyed looking through the open catalog of freesound.org.

This little piece started while trying to manage a moment of personal frustration. Not a good moment, so I started my search with the term “search.” A number of the tracks were recordings of police searches in which you heard the drone of helicopters hovering, intermittent siren bursts, and the clipped chatter on a radio scanner. Not an uplifting set of sounds imagining that there are likely individuals (good or bad) that are in a state of mental and emotional strain hiding from this noise.

But there were other ephemera that came up in my “search” – a person rustling through a pile of wrenches trying to find the right one, a turn of the radio dial looking for a good song for the road, and the ever hopeful imaginers that believe there might be signs of extraterrestrial life in a series of NASA SETI pulses. These are buoyant pieces, and can help bring you back up.

This is a complete list of the sound samples used from freesound.org:

SETI Pulses NASA by Dynamicell

Radio Suche (finding a station) by mwirth

Rustling Wrenches by vibe_crc

Helicopter Police Search by daveincamas

Windorgan (Wind sounds at Sea) by klankbeeld

Mysterysnippets (How about now) by NoiseCollector

Pastor Steve Speaking by nicStage

Scare Kids by ERH

Direct Order Do it Now by ERH

For editing, I ended up using the video editor Final Cut Pro, using only the sound tracks, only because I’m really comfortable with it. I do hope to make some time to play around with Audacity though.


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One response to “Do It Now!”

  1. Ned Avatar

    Wow, very impressive mashup! That was some really good editing too, didn’t know you could find those types of sounds on freesound, I’ll have to try looking through the open catalog rather than just using super specific searches. I like your response to hearing the police searching sounds too, “there are likely individuals (good or bad) that are in a state of mental and emotional strain hiding from this noise”, not what most people would say, well put.