Cruising Around the Campground ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This week, I’m staying at a cottage at Carolina Pines campground near Myrtle Beach, SC. This is my favorite destination for the summer. On our vacations here, we spend a ridiculous amount of time driving around on a golf cart people watching and taking in the scenery. For one of my DS106 audio bank assignments, I decided to record the sounds of my city. Although this isn’t my city of residence, it’s where I’m living for week 3 of this course.

For this assignment, I decided to record the sounds I hear in a typical day at the campground. I started by recording the sound of our golf cart as I drove to locations to record additional sounds. My first stop was the basketball court. There is typically a large crowd of kids there and I was able to capture the sound of balls bouncing and children’s voices. I actually duplicated the sound of a child saying “Mommy” and used it a few times in my final audio clip.

Next, I drove over to the billiards room, where’s there’s a nice area with two tables set up. When I went in, there was a pair of older gentlemen and a group of teenagers playing at each table. You can hear the balls being hit and talking in an several groups of conversations. I ended up editing out most of their voices. I kept only a short clip of that I felt was most recognizable as billiards and repeated it to create a longer clip.

After the billiard’s room, I drove over to the swimming pools. I got out of the golf cart and walked around to record sounds from two different pools, a splash pad, and the waterpark. I was able to capture the sounds of kids playing and jumping into the pools, water splashing, and the giant bucket that dumps water on kids at the waterpark. I ended up editing these into one clip that sounds like it was recorded at a single location.

After I finished capturing the sounds of the campground, I went back to my cottage to start editing the files. I used Freesound.org for the background music. A link to the exact clip I used is here. I used Soundtrap to edit the clips together into a single clip.

Tutorial

Okay, it’s time to be real here. I did a lot of experimenting, deleting, and cursing during this assignment. This video was the best help that I could find outside of just jumping in and figuring it out through trial and error. Initially, I tried using a few apps on my iPhone for post-production, but they all required that I pay for more than three special effects, including the fade in/out effects. These were really important for this assignment in order to make the transitions sound more natural, as if I were approaching the locations in my golf cart.

Although I highly recommend that you watch a few tutorials to learn how to edit the audio in Soundtrap, below is a screenshot of my project in Soundtrap that shows the various audio clips I used for this assignment on the timeline. You can see where I used fade in/out effects, as well as where I created small “accent sounds” and sprinkled them throughout the timeline to add balance and rhythm in the final product. Some examples of these accent sounds are the child saying, “Mommy” at the basketball court, the golf cart horn, and a splash at the pool.