Tinkling of sleigh bells, of hoofbeats on the rooftop, the warm crackling sounds of apple pie baking…Oh, wait, wrong script. [pickup] “…the warm crackling sounds of fire breaking out in the living room…]
This-here is the idiots guide to kick-ass soundscaping of the home for the holidays.
Soundscaping – for Effect and Fun
Having read many, many books on Disney Imagineering, plus having been around many of the studios in Los Angeles, where I ran a recording engineer college (and largely rewrote curriculum for the course and got through accreditation with it…) I feel moderately qualified to offer a few ideas. We’re going to start from scratch and assume you know nothing.
To do this, we’ll do some “minimalist soundscaping” first. We will begin working on the simplest hardware approach we can think of:
For this class project you need a “scream box” which are still in good supply after Halloween. On Amazon, try the Replaceable Voice Motion Sensor PIR Infrared Sound Player Haunted House Scream Box Speaker with USB Download Function Christmas MP3 Horror Happy Music Motion Activated Voice Player which puts a $23 dent in the holiday cheer. The unit is smaller thanits Amazon title.
The way these work is simple:
- You put in a 9 volt battery.
- You plug the unit into your computer’s USB port and it will become a (very small) .MP3 storage device.
- You then copy up to a few minutes (megs) of .MP3 over to the scream box.
- Turn off the scream box, Disconnect the USB.
- Turn the unit on again. Wave hand in front of it (it should play the first of your .MP3s),
- Having gotten this far, you can now soundscape your home with “borrowed” sound effects from YouTube. (We’ll do that in a sec.)
At the end of this short workflow, you will have a “loaded scream box” ready to install and amaze the kids.
How We Soundscaped Our Dining Room
I daresay most readers have figured out, over the years, that our wildness doesn’t end with the keyboard or mice. Our whole house has been through at least once and partially “themed.” Which is – as Elaine explains it – the art of getting the inside of a “house” to become a whole separate detached place from what’s outside. The usual reaction to our house – when most people come in the first time – is “THIS is a trailer?” Well, yes. But Pirates of the Caribbean is just a big wide-span building, too…
See, it’s the contents (and people) that turn a house into a home and better, an off-planet experience.
Our dining room is a bit of the old Trader Vic’s in mottif. This is a little washed out (hard flash was on), but you can get the vibe (and even see my new railing lower bottom of the frame) here – it’s outside the window:
Now, if you look for the scream box at this location, it’s hidden in the reeds at the right-hand bottom of the “fake rafters.”
NO ONE ever notices it, but they sure notice the mood when it begins. Music fires on motion!
And – in keeping with the Tiki/Trader’s “transport capsule” idea, we generally have an assortment of 30-60 second clips of 1960s Tiki Retro tune edits in the rotation. One time you come into the room, you’ll get 45-seconds of Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village” while the next walk through could trigger some old Arthur Lyman and (of course!) Hawaii Five-Oh by the Ventures.
Naturally, being an “old radio guy” I miss the Golden Years of Rock and Roll. So I can whip together my own “Christmas special jingles” between holiday snips from the scream box.
To get the conversions done, simply:
- Go to YouTube and find the the video that has the sound you want to “borrow.”
- Copy the URL to your clipboard.
- Then go to Y2Mate (like Y2Mate – YouTube to MP3 Converter)
- Paste in the Youtube video URL and hit convert. (It will default to .mp3 output which is what you want. Which in my example was getting the single 3:51 start of the jingle for our collection – the medium-slow Merry Christmas jingle.
- Download the file and save on your local machine.
Editing? No problem!
OK, what we have is a dandy collection of KFRC jingles from the Ellis B. Easter collection, but who cares about the overhead? We need to edit out the part we want for our little Christmas mood-o-rama.
For this we’ll download the creme of the (free) digital audio workstation (DAWs) Audacity. Go to Audacity ® | Download for Windows and use the simple 64-bit installer. If you click on MuseHub you will get into complexity that will run out of time today. Let’s keep this simple.
Once you have downloaded Audacity (and skipped the nag screen at start-up) the next step will be to navigate (mit de mousen) to your download directory. On this computer, that happens to look like this:
(If you’re really jacked on the bean this early, you will notice I am already working on 2024 taxes because Amazon has TurboTax out already…why do you think our tax attorney comes down here for Thanksgiving?)
Editing Your Audio
When you open the MP3 file, it will look like this on your screen and pay attention to the blue arrow! It points to a tool you’ll be using.
This is the “selection tool”. You are now going to go over to about 3:51 which will be in the window at the red arrow, press down, and drag your mouse to the left. This will highlight the audio you want to get rid off (by hitting the delete key).
You can click the Select tool anywhere in the audio tracks area and you will be able to see the time (see the yellow arrow? Hell, no missing that, is there?).
When you get this far and push “DEL” on your keyboard the stuff left (earlier) than what you wanted is gone.
Now, all we have to do is hit the play arrow and then instantly stop and select from there to the right this time to clear out all the later stuff in the track that you don’t want.
If you are old and infirm (at 75 this will come to matter), you can roll in or out with a scrolling mouse for zoom level.
Now, we will bring the Tools pulldown menu and slide the surviving clump of audio all the way to the left to the start of the track, like so:
Last step is to take the file menu and export this as an .MP3 file so you can save it (and have it in the rotation) of your scream box.
Next you open the File menu, go down to export, select save to your computer, and set up the (default) right format (.mp3, 44100 is fine for this) and give it a name you can find later. Because you will load it as a file onto the scream box, or to the music automation software of your choice.
What we have done in this first class is to produce this:
There. Lesson #1 in Soundscaping is complete. We did it with a simple (borrowed from Ellis B. Easter’s fine work) and now you can clip and pull out all kinds of audio sounds.
And since we like the whole Pirates of the Caribbean concept, what do you think we might be able to do with Pirates of the Caribbean 2024 [FULL RIDE-THROUGH] |Magic Kingdom – Walt Disney World? Um…who us?
Shop Dust and Sweepings
We had 6.3 inches of rain since last Sunday in this part of East Texas. Needless to say, the “burn ban” based on fire risk was ended.
Only two very minor ham radio developments, but useful with my consigliere coming in just over two-weeks for that Scotch bet payoff. (Not a bad bet to lose; he does get the whole big turkey dinner with all the fixings, a prime rib while he’s here, and we’ll be doing drone ham antenna projects and maybe bring the big tower and triband beam down for repairs.
Got measuring done for another OCFD antenna – this will be a north-northeast so south-southwest affair. And fed with 450-ohm ladder line. The one side will be 107 feet, then twiddling with EZNEC to see what the other leg should be. Everywhere from nine feet out to 500, or so will be tested.
I’ve modeled a few prospects, but as we have reminded you before, really long antennas (for 160 and 80 meters) tend to get (end-firing) directional on multiples of the primary frequency. And the Big Signal comes off the long end of the wire. So if the (literally) south end of the antenna gets bigger than they north, coverage into Europe and the western Pacific will fade and useless sections of empty oceans will hear us 20-over nine.
I did buy a little doo-dad you might be interested in. There’s an inexpensive 50-watt 13 volt HF amplifier with some bandpass filtering in it for just over $100 bucks on eBay. Have one coming. The idea is simple: I have a number of small, low power (called QRP) HF radios but they each only put out about 3-4 watts.
Now, sure, my best ever is 1,500 miles-per-watt (Morse code, 20-meters, and with another FISTS member), But for more reliable communications – like Hanks 40 meter net on the Big Island in Hawaii – 5 watts is not nearly as dependable as 50 watts. From there 100 is not as big an increase.
I ought to save Hank the trouble of saying “Well, yes, except the speech processing on the Icom 7300 (and class something or other finals) make a world of difference on sideband (voice) coms…” Don’t tell him I’ve resigned myself to buying the next Icom that has a remote mounting head and which has the direct to software features of the 7300. But still, the Ten-Tec Omni VII is a joy to listen to with no noticeable digital artifacts…)
I might get to putting the new regulator board in the Omni (which still works all except for the power on/off switch. Maybe I can write that up for next week, but for this weekend, the audio and screambox training should be a big enough time sink for now…
Anyone hear from Bruno in New York lately? Hope all’s well with him…
Write when you get away,
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