Our feature this week is written by the husband/wife developer team at RhodeSoft, who share their experiences on creating sound effects for children’s book apps. Sound can add depth, navigation and interactivity to the user experience. But it doesn’t have to be produced in Hollywood to succeed. As seen here, a little resourcefulness, dedication and innovation can go a long way.
Our company, RhodeSoft, develops apps for children under the brand name Reading Rhino. We are a husband and wife team (Toni & Jacob), and our grown son sometimes contributes to the venture. Even our dog contributes — he’s the barking sound in one of our apps.
Our background? Toni was an elementary school teacher for many years and is now an educational writer. Jacob is a research engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology and has a master’s degree in communications, specializing in film and video.
Our first picture book app, Lula’s Brew, was written and illustrated by Elizabeth O. Dulemba, a very talented artist. The creation of this app gave us our first experience at producing narration. Elizabeth was gracious enough to narrate her story, but we couldn’t afford to hire the services of a professional sound studio. So . . . we fell back on the knowledge Jacob got from his film and video studies and his general can-do attitude to make our own sound booth. After finding a kit on the Internet, Jacob constructed his sound booth out of PVC pipe and heavy moving blankets. He already had a professional microphone and recorder from his student movie-making days.
We learned many things from this crash course in sound recording. The artist needs to read from a script, and we need to provide light in the booth, so she can see her script! She must record the date and time at the beginning and say “Take 1, ” “Take 2,” etc. She needs to stay away from dairy or salty foods before the recording session so that she doesn’t have “gummy mouth.” It’s important to turn off all noises in the house, including the refrigerator and air conditioner during the recording. Elizabeth is very experienced and did an outstanding job of narrating her story.
Our next picture book app, But That Wasn’t the Best Part, by Jerry Jindrich of the website Chateau Meddybemps, challenged us to create sound effects and touch-screen features. In this app the reader joins a noisy crowd watching the Grand Parade of the International Banana Festival.
It was a challenge to create the sounds of the crowd, the siren of a police car, the drill team marching past, the clang-clang of a fire engine, and the toot-toot-puff-puff of a little train. Mostly, we could not find royalty-free sound effects and had to make our own. The ding sound of a Korean bell in our den became the clang-clang of the little train’s bell. From around the house and garage, we recorded our car horn, our dog barking, and our own voices for the characters in the story. After getting permission and giving credit, we got the fire engine putt-putt sound from a Website that featured vintage cars. Sound effects came packaged with the program Logic Express. Jacob used this program to manipulate the sounds to fit the needs of our app — like the horns of the Latin Band.
For the narration of But That Wasn’t the Best Part, Jacob got into the sound booth to tell the story.
What’s next for Reading Rhino? We are working again with Jerry Jindrich to produce an app called “Story Starters,” which is pulled directly from the Young Writers Workshop section of his Website. This app will feature Jerry’s charming pictures along with a few sentences to get a young writer started. Using the built-in typewriter, the writer will continue the story.
Marketing our apps was a hit-or-miss (mostly miss) enterprise until “Lula’s Brew” was listed in the “Apps for Kids” section of the App Store. We really don’t know how that happened. Our guess is that one of the Apple reviewers took a look at the app, decided it was professional quality, and directed it to the kid’s list. As the developer Tiny Hearts said recently in this blog, “App Marketing Rule #1: Get Featured by Apple.” !!
Great explanatory post on sound design for folk unfamiliar with such stuff.
Speaking with my ex-composer/sound-designer’s hat on I can also suggest:
The fantastic resources at: http://freesound.org – material there is under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. Free for reuse in a commercial application with appropriate attribution.
More legalese at: http://www.freesound.org/legal.php
Download the GPL program Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
It’s quirky, the UI is generally poor under OSX and saving files can be a pain under Snow Leopard because the keyboard shortcuts for transport etc are still active in the Save Dialog box, but it’s an extremely powerful audio editor (and free.) Make sure you also install the LADPSA plugins under /Applications/Audacity/LADSPA and you’ll have a bazillion additional audio filters to “photoshop” your audio to your heart’s content. The LADSPA plugins for Audacity can be found at:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/plugins
Finally, Garageband is an **extremely** powerful beast under the hood. (It’s actually the pro-level Logic sequencer with an dumbed down interface.) The audio engine inside is extremely capable. You don’t have to use it to record music (although of course, it does that very well.) You can use it as an effects suite to process and master your audio.
One simple, but powerful example is to drag your audio samples (WAV, AIF, MP3 or AAC or even MP4 video files) into new blank project. (You can also use it design your soundtrack by arranging multiple samples at various points in the timeline). Double click the track to select it. On the RHS pane, you’ll see two tabs: Browse and Edit. Choose the Edit tab, and click the little blue light to the left of the Visual EQ plugin. Double click the sliders icon that appear when you rollover the blue waveform icon next to where it says Visual EQ and the Visual EQ popup window will appear. Make sure you check the Analyzer checkbox in the bottom right hand corner. Now if you play your samples, you can watch the real time spectrum analysis of the audio and make EQ tweaks in realtime just by dragging your mouse around in that window.
You can also chain and add many other pro-quality effects available within Garageband. Just make sure you work with uncompressed files (working successively with MP3 or other lossy formats is bad because you lose information at every iteration upon export). Make sure Preferences > Advanced > Audio Resolution = Best. When you export, make sure the Compress option is unchecked. I usually just use Share > Send Song to iTunes and type in useful notes in the Artist field so I can compare a whole bunch of different effected audio files side by side in iTunes.
Cheers,
– Ian
I am happy to see Toni and Jim featured here. It’s interesting to hear the “behind the scenes” methods a family business can use to make apps on par w/ the big guys!