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Sound
Here are some ideas to help you with the sound part of your haunt or party.
If you would like to go directly to a specific section of the page click on the subject you would like to read.
How to "play" your Haunt sounds & music
An easy way to play your music or sounds is on a cd, no matter if you are using a cd you purchased or one that you made.
You can go to garage sales or goodwill stores and find a cheap CD player(s) and speakers. You can also look at Walmart or Kmart too.
On your cd player just select repeat and you can automaticly have one track or the whole cd repeated continuously.
You can also use an mp3 player. You can purchase mp3 speakers to plug into your mp3.
Or you can use your computer and external speakers to play your sounds too.
How to "place" your sound(s)
If you are planning on having just ONE "background" sound source, you can use music, a soundscape or a whole cd with different creepy musical tracks or one with just an ambient background sound (for example a humming motor noise, chains clanking with screams or monster noises, or laboratory noises)
If you are planning on having a overall background sound & have individual sounds in scenes, then you need to go this route: For your background sound you shouldn't use music but a soundscape that will not compete with the sound you will be playing in your scene.
*From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A soundscape is a sound or combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment. The idea of soundscape refers to both the natural acoustic environment, consisting of natural sounds, including animal vocalizations and, for instance, the sounds of weather and other natural elements; and environmental sounds created by humans, through musical composition, sound design, and other ordinary human activities including conversation, work, and sounds of mechanical origin resulting from use of industrial technology.*
For example, If your haunt was a "Haunted Castle" you could have a track that would play throughout your haunt that had sounds either just one individually or mixed together of whispers, creaks, flying bats, or perhaps thunder. If you had a scene that had roaches all over the walls and had a sound track playing that consisted of sounds of bugs crawing around and scratching you could clearly hear the bug sounds with the (soundscape-thunder-or whatever sound) in the background. If you would have used music for you overall haunt sound, your sounds of bugs would have been drowned out or not very clear to your guests. A soundscape will compliment the sounds in your individual scenes another words work together with your scene sounds not compete with them.
Haunt Music & Soundscapes
Looking for some dark, creepy mood setting music for your haunt or party?
There are many to choose from, here is some information on the different types and groups available along with links to their web site where most of them have the option to listen to sample tracks of the albums.
Virgil is a professional composer/ educator with a penchant for writing adventure music, film scores, and music for haunted attractions. He has several albums available. The different types are background, themed, dark, ambient, and more.
As Midnight Syndicate, composers Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka have been producing classic gothic nightmare soundtracks for the imagination for over eleven years. The standard for Halloween, Haunted Attractions, and role-playing games, their CDs are designed to take you to the darkest and most fantastic corners of your imagination. Definately a must have for your haunt music collection!
Nox Arcana's haunting Gothic soundtracks are often used in independent films, in theme parks during Halloween, and for role-playing games.
Hedstorm is a family owned business with over 65 combined years of experience in the music and entertainment industry. The focus is primarily on dark music cds by Michael with additional vocal work by Tamara.
Sound FX
You can find many different Sound fx files on the internet. Here are some great sites to find some really cool sounds!
FREE:
www.PartnersinRhyme.com
www.darklinks.com
www.soundfx.com
AudioMicro.com - Free Sounds Page
Pay for tracks you want, very cool sounds, you can get pretty much any sound you need or want, great for creating your own tracks!
www.AudioSparx.com
www.SoundDogs.com
www.AudioMicro.com - buy tracks page
www.partnersinrhyme.com
How to make your own soundscapes and sounds
Don't like the cd's that jump from sound to sound?
Do you want specific sounds, voices or background music in your scene?
Then here is one way to make just that!
First you need to download a Free program called Audacity. You can do this at http://audacity.sourceforge.net.
Audacity is a program that allows you to take sound files (from 1 to as many as you want) mix them together, play one over another, add them anywhere in another track, add echo and many other effects to make a very unique sound combination or music track. This is software for recording and editing sounds. I use this program to make cd's for my scenes. You can also make tracks go back and forth between the left and right speakers (great for whispers in a hallway scene)!
For example, if you had a scene that was a cemetery you could start out with a sound file of wind blowing then add a track of wolves howling. You could add as many different wolf sound files you wanted and place them in different sections of the wind howling. Also you can set the volume for each track so you could make some sound close up and some far away. You could do this with all of your individual tracks which allows you to have some sounds stand out more than others. You could then add more tracks of other items (zombie moans, shovel digging, owls, crickets, etc.) if you wish to custom make the sound you want for your scene.
Where to get these sound files?
There are many sites on the web where you can get background sounds, voices, and just about any sound you can imagine. Most of them you can just right click on them and choose "save target as" this will allow you to save the sound file onto your computer in the folder of your choice for later use.
Just make sure the sound file you are going to use is NOT copyrighted! Some are, some are not. If you are not sure send them an email an ask if you are free to use them.
You can also use Audaity to make your own sound files. (For more detailed instructions on how to use Audacity goto Essential Audacity from Efx-Tek.com! or Audacity Tutorials!
Just get a microphone that will plug into your microphone jack on your computer (I use a microphone that came with a singing Douglas Fir christmas tree that I hacked into a Halloween prop-it has a small plug on it like for a set of headphones which is the size of plug that is on my computer). Click on the record button in Audacity then talk, sing, scream, record sounds outside, dogs barking, chains, doors opening or what ever you want. Then "export as" and this will let you save your sound as an mp3 file. Don't worry you can change and warp the sound later. But at least now you can open the same sound and change it in different ways so you may have multiple different sound files that you have created all from one file.
For example if you have a sound file of a dog barking you would open that files in Audicaity then you could change the tempo and/or speed to make it a deeper bark then save the file. Reopen the same original file again but, this time slow the speed down and change the pitch, and save the file again now you have a comoletely differend sounding dog bark. Again reopen the original file and cut some of it out, speed it up, add some echo or whatever effect you like making another different sounding file.
That is how you can take 1 file and make many different ones from it. Of course you can spend a lot of time and add or change many different effects to really change the sound it just depends on how much time you want to spend on it and how "different" sounding you want the file to become.
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