In our prop room at my University, we had tons of old and new items. I decided to sit down one day and record some of what I heard. Most of these have been used in productions to follow. This was done over the summer of 2011 with some students from The Orchard Project in Hunter NY. I had the honor of being invited to be a resident artist to show them how to make sound effects for a production. This is one of the radio shows we produced while up there. All the sounds you hear are hand made. I also showed them how to use every day objects to create not so every day sounds. I came across this sound while doing a short film for one of my friends. They were having trouble coming up with a sound for skin pealing. I decided to try using an orange pealing to make the sound of skin pealing...since I had never heard the sound before. This is what it sounded like. This was created for a class in college. The assignment was to write a short dialigue that went along with an article. The article was about H1N1. Most of the sounds in this were created and not pulled from stock. The footsteps, keys, door open and close, sneezing sick sounds, plates, kitchen noises, radio click noise, typing noise, wind chimes were all created and not pulled from stock. The radio sound was found, it was too clean sounding so i added some filters.
"May 24, 2009 LIVES Unmasked By COLLEEN KINDER My roommate burst through the door of our Mexico City apartment with her fingers curled like monster claws. The claws rose slowly toward the blue surgical mask covering her mouth. “Grrrrr!” Silvia growled. I waited for her to yank down the mask and smile. This was the first I’d seen my roommate since the words “swine flu” swept across the capital. The Mexican Army had just distributed truckloads of masks, changing the face of the entire city in one Friday afternoon. A sense of humor was welcome relief. But Silvia was only half joking. I heard a chuckle, but the mask never came off — not even as she cooked dinner. By the time our third roommate came home in her own blue mask, our place looked like an E.R. scrub room and felt as tense. Silvia’s brown eyes looked enormous as she asked, from across the kitchen, “Where’s your mask?” I’m not a worrier. Seven months ago, when I moved to Distrito Federal, an area notorious for crime, people warned me to keep my guard up. But I’d yet to see proof of the danger. On the other hand, until now, I’d never been in a megacity bracing for an epidemic, with 20 million neighbors (and two roommates) covering their mouths and noses in anticipation of mortal influenza. So on Day 2, I called a doctor friend. He groaned with ambivalence when I asked if I should wear a mask. “Nah,” he finally said. “Masks are overdoing it.” I’d hoped for a more confident ruling but took his permission to breathe free. Later, my roommate shared the advice of her doctor. “You have to put on a new mask every half-hour,” she told me, “or they don’t do anything.” Day 3 was eerie. I walked down familiar streets and found everyone’s face swathed in blue, or turquoise, or white, or faint pink. By Sunday, tapabocas (“mouth-caps”) were in a clear majority in my neighborhood. I recognized people only if they waved to me first, then tugged down their masks. I stood my ground in the unmasked minority. In spite of swine flu, I wanted to look like myself, and I wasn’t ready to side with paranoia. But I also wanted to be sure. I read the news compulsively. I kept one ear to Mexican radio. If there was no consensus on tapabocas, I thought I might at least find a safe midpoint between overreactions and underreactions. On the topic of masks, though, disagreement was dizzying: masks don’t work; only the white masks work; masks protect other people from you; masks protect you from other people; masks are pointless because you just end up touching your face to adjust the strings and touching your face is the surest way to catch swine influenza. “Are you wearing a mask?!?!” shrieked the subject line of an e-mail message from my mother. By Day 4, paranoia had gone global. Egypt was slaughtering pigs; Argentina was denying flights; and Mom wanted me home in Buffalo. The death count rose, and I finally surrendered to the logic of better-safe-than-sorry: I went to buy a mask. I could decide later whether to put it on. “Ya no hay,” the pharmacist repeated, as I stood there, dumbfounded. “They’re all gone.” Now that it was impossible to get tapabocas, I wanted five dozen. My anxiety increased when I received an e-mail update from my doctor friend listing ways to combat flu, including “always use surgical masks in public places.” I felt, for the first time in my life, that resisting precaution had made me the fool. Everywhere, I saw people practicing a meticulous hygiene that I was hopeless to imitate. I could hardly get through even my most practiced routines anymore. I locked my keys inside my apartment, twice, and had to climb in from a neighbor’s balcony. I left water boiling until the empty pot burned. I somehow missed a 5.6 earthquake because I was too busy staring at a woman trying to pay for her groceries while holding a green bandanna over her mouth. I just stood there as — so they tell me — the earth shook. On Day 5, I called my sister to hear a voice from outside this valley of swine flu, the voice of a person standing on solid ground. “It could be worse,” she offered. “How could it be worse?” I asked. My neighborhood looked like a deserted fairground. The city was losing at least $10 million a day. Physical contact was practically banned. If I succeeded in speaking with strangers, our conversations inevitably drifted toward germs, or apocalypse. As if concluding an episode of “Scooby-Doo,” my sister yanked the mask off Mexico City, to reveal what the 20 million of us had, in five days, lost sight of completely: “The people around you could actually be sick.” Colleen Kinder is the author of “Delaying the Real World: A Twentysomething’s Guide to Seeking Adventure.” Submissions for Lives may be sent to lives@nytimes.com. The magazine cannot return or respond to unsolicited manuscripts." This curtain speech was written by myself and the stage manager for the production. It is in verse just like Dr. Suess. This was a freshman workshop.
|