Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens – part 1

I thought I’d kick the blog off by telling you about a few of my favourite things.  Not the kettles and mittens, you understand; those, as any Sound of Music fan worth their salt will tell you, belong to Julie Andrews.  Instead, I thought I’d share some of my favourite parts of the internet. *  There are some websites which I find myself returning to time and time again in classrooms, and which, were they to vanish over night, I would miss more than I can tell you.  

The first of these is the fabulous findsounds.com ,  an essential stop if you are doing any kind of podcasting or multimedia work which could use some sound effects.    It is an incredibly simple site to use;  just type the sound effect you want to find into the search box, and hit search.  Unless you’ve picked something a bit too obscure  you’ll see a list of results which loook like this:

For each entry there is  a sound wave diagram, which you can ignore,  a web address,which you can ignore, and some information about the file, which you can mainly ignore; although both the file size and the length in seconds (which, helpfully, are the two bits at either end)  may be useful to know.  More about these later.

What you really don’t want to ignore is the  little loudspeaker icon, to the left of the web link.  Click on it to listen to the sound and, if you decide this particular one is the right sound effect for you,  right-click on the same icon then select Save Target As to store it on your computer.  Then it can be inserted into your podcast, or  powerpoint, or moviemaker presentation, or IWB flipchart, or…well, you get the idea.  You could even just play it directly from your computer.

A quick tip: sound files come in different formats and not all of them work with all software.  You can limit the file formats you want to find by unticking boxes.  MP3s and WAVE files are the most commonly accepted, so leave those but untick the others like this:

 It’s good to get your kids into the habit of doing this whenever they search, to save the heartache of finding the perfect sound only to discover that you won’t be able to use it becuase it’s the wrong format.

It’s also a good idea to encourage kids to check the file size and length of each sound before they save.  Going back to the helicopter above, for instance, you will notice it only lasts for 1.8 seconds.  This might be fine if you just want to create the effect of being in the air, but not so great if you are recording a conversation between two pilots and want the sound playing behind them while they talk. 

The file size is 75k here, which is OK.  Without wanting to get too technical (because I’m not)  the bigger the file size, the longer it will take to download and the harder it will be to work with, particularly if you plan to use several different sound files in one presentation, as will often be the case.  There are 1000k in a megabyte (MB) and once you are over 1 or 2 MB, you may find things start to slow down.  As I said, the 75k here will probably be absolutely fine.

 There’s a pretty comprehensive libary of sounds available, although you won’t find any music (I’ll write a separate post about where you can find that, though, at some point).  A quick, somewhat random, look just now has turned up over 200 explosions, 14 different traffic sounds and several slightly disturbed sounding frogs.   You do have to be quite specific about what you want: footsteps works better than walking, and gobbling returns no results while eating gives a fair few to choose from. Personally, I don’t think this is a bad thing; it’s a good chance to teach kids about refining search terms, using synonyms and using the correct language to describe what they want to hear.  Having them work in pairs to search for suitable sounds can be a good way to encourage this.

*On a side note, do you think if Julie Andrews had been able to access the internet, she would have just used net-a-porter.com instead of making all of those clothes out of old curtains?