BCT 400 (CAT 250)

TUTORIAL: MAKING ORIGINAL SOUND (.wav files)

Teaching Team: Drs. Price, McFadden and Marsh

denotes original sound

BACKGROUND

You can add original sound to your homepage, a Power Point slide, and any other electronic product. You may choose to add original sound to your products just to add "bells and whistles", which is fine. However, you may also want to add original sound in order to enhance the message of the product. Teachers, public relations and marketing personnel have all used original sound in their products for good purpose.

Typically these original sound files are in the .wav file format.

One Example of an Application of Original Sound, Coupled with Power Point

Original sound can be used by presenters to add information during their presentation or as a means of making the presentation materials "stand-alone" for later use when the presenter is not present. For example, a teacher might use a Power Point presentation to "teach" or "demonstrate" a particular concept. He/she might also make a notes page for each slide, as "lecture" notes for that slide.

At the time the product was produced, the teacher anticipated actually standing in front of a group and giving the "lecture" or "presentation". Thus the teacher planned to use the lecture notes on the note page as a guide OR as a handout for the group.

However, later, the teacher discovered that several of students did not understand and that several of them were absent on that day. The teacher then has to give the "lecture" again! At that point, the teacher might decide to make original sound for each slide, basically giving the "lecture", slide by slide, capturing it electronically as a sound file. Then, each student can run the Power Point presentation independently on a computer and actually hear what the teacher said, just as if the student had been present.

To take it a step further, that Power Point can be put on the net, complete with sound, so that students can see and hear the information over and over again on their own computers via the Internet.

Another Example of Using Original Sound

In education and in many other disciplines, it becomes necessary to prepare learning materials or tutorials. These tutorials can be made using Power Point or other tools and original sound so that the learners can see and hear them over and over, at their own convenience.

An example of this is this tutorial itself. It DOES NOT use Power Point but, instead, using various tools such as a digital camera, a screen capture program (WINCOPY) and Netscape Composer. Dr. Price made the tutorials on how to make original sound, USING original sound.

TUTORIAL: How to Make Original Sound

The TOOLS: Windows

On your computer, go to START (see the figure below and follow along with the steps)

Select PROGRAMS, then from there select ACCESSORIES.

From ACCESSORIES, select MULTIMEDIA, and from there select SOUND RECORDER (see below)

This will bring up the Sound Recorder, as shown below.

Once you have made your sound clip, you will want to go to FILE and select "save as", as shown below, to save the clip. You save it into the directory with the other files for the product you are preparing.

SOME TIPS

EDITING A CLIP

Be careful when you edit! If you aren't careful, you may end up with additional information on the clip that you did not want included in your sound clip!
For example ... .

If you want to edit your sound clip, here are the steps:

open the file
let it play to the point where you want to edit
click on EDIT

Select Delete Before Current Position or Delete After Current Position depending on what you want to edit out.

SAVE results in the new version saved. SAVE AS results in this new version saved into a new file. Either way, you have edited your sound clip from the point selected, forward.

Important:

When you are saving ALL your files (sounds, webpages, images, etc.), DO NOT USE SPACES OR SYMBOLS IN YOUR FILENAMES. Get used to use inly lowercase letters, that way you keep consistent with all filenames. Many ISPs, including BAMA, are case sensitive, so there is a difference between uppercase and lowercase letters. If you use spaces your files will NOT come up when viewed online. A similar thing happens if the computer is trying to look for a name that has a different latter case, those files will not appear. BE CONSISTENT: NO SPACES, USE ONLY LOWERCASE.

LENGTH OF CLIPS

Sound clips can be as long as needed, but, sometimes it is better to break them into smaller pieces, rather than one long sound clip. You know.... it's like a long, boring lecture; it seems better when punctuated by frequent diversions and breaks!

Also lengthy clips embedded in products on the net take a long time to download typically*. Definitely, if you are going to upload your product to the Internet, you are better off with shorter sound clips. If you are going to run your sound clips within Power Point or other presentation media from your hard drive, then it's not quite the problem. Generally, though, the shorter the better is the rule of thumb.

THE MICROPHONE

First, make sure you have a good microphone. We prefer to use the ones that go on your head, with the actual microphone sitting right in front of the mouth . Here's a photo of Dr. Price with the microphone (and here's one not so CLOSE) while making original sounds for her products. You can use other microphones, but this type seems to reduce the amount of background noise.

To learn how to insert movies and sound into your PowerPoint, go to the tutorial. You can insert these into your .html files (like homepage), too. OH... and here's a photo of Dr. Price WITHOUT the headset!