When we were given the assignment this week to make a sound story, I was terrified. I have never dealt solely with sound before and was nervous about doing sound editing, especially when I realized that I would need to make a sound story with only sound effects and no spoken words. My first thought was to do a story that was what I heard when starting up my Macbook, that is the ‘wake up’ sound as well as the sounds that various apps make when opening up including the custom Tardis noises I have into Addium. I started looking for sounds for that but soon stumbled upon a blog post about the sounds made while sewing, which inspired me to make a sewing themed sound story.
The first step of my process was to figure out what I actually heard while I was in the costume shop. Despite spending 25 hours there so sergers far this semester and over 200 hours since I started at UMW, nothing really came to mind other than the sounds of the machines and running, the music that various people play and most importantly, random banging noises from the set shop which is conveniently located directly above the costume shop.
I decided to look for sewing sounds and was amazed by how many there were available for free online. I found a recording of an iron as well as various sewing machines on the Internet Archive. I decided to use the iron in the background as white noise as well as because the irons in the costume shop are near the sewing machines so they can often be head while sewing. I then chose and spliced together four machine sounds, the first one being thread winding, followed by threading a machine with the new bobbin that was just bound, stitching with the machine while it is being temperamental and finally stitching on the machine while it is running correctly. The sounds of the iron do not often come through except for when the machine is being threaded at which point the iron can be heard giving off a burst of steam.
To make my sound story, I put all the sounds into Audicity and then cut all but the iron sound effect so that in total,my effects were less than 60 seconds in length. I then put them in order and layered them with the iron sound before uploading them to SoundCloud.
Ideally, I would have recorded all of my own sounds but due to this being the week before tech starts for Harvey and the shop being hectic, it just was not possible. The sounds that I found are fine although I thought that most of the ‘sewing machine’ sounds sounded more like a serger.
