Auralphonic Episode 9: Music and Sound Effects

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Auralphonic Episode 9: Music and Sound Effects. Dated: August 2015.

Music: Not everyone’s a fan of intro/outro music clips because music taste can come into play, but some podficcers like to use music that’s been indicated by the author in their notes. It mostly overlaps with atmospheric notes and some scene break bits, but it also depends on the fandom (Bandom has quite a bit of songfic, and for those who don’t want to sing, it’s easier to add a snippet of music).

Atmospheric examples fit with basic background noises, a sound effect on an elf’s voice that fits the textual description, violin music included in a Sherlock piece where he plays violin music, and so on. It does help, but some people still don’t do these because they started out not doing so. (Early music and sound effect examples also had some volume and talk over issues, so some internalized not wanting to interfere with understanding what’s being said. As more people have gotten experience and the editing skills have gotten better, attitudes have softened from being Anti-Music Included.)

Common uses of sound effects: Clarity around scene breaks, flashbacks (Gverb example played, but Audacity has changed their settings, so YMMV), text messages (message ping), epistolary (a different sound effect for letters, emails, etc.), sound effect to indicate footnote (I’m not sure about the example, tbh). Some people use distinct sound effects for these purposes, but some use a little clip of music for certain usages (like scene breaks).

Free Sound Effects: https://freesound.org/

(On that epistolary example: Some people don’t want to cut out what’s written on the page, but some people don’t want to listen to (f’ex in emails) “To Such-and-such. From So-and-so” because you can skip that when reading, in a manner of speaking. Some people extend this to text message info or an example played that included code that would be mentally skipped.)