A Tribute to Lucky Ducky

The Assignment: Create A Place (Four Stars)

The Story: I grew up in a really rural town with a population of roughly 600 people. I lived on a horse farm with my mom and I had a horse named Lucky. His show name was Known to Be Lucky, and I liked to call him Lucky Ducky. Anyways, despite his sweet innocent little face (yes that’s him above) he was actually quite devious at times. He had a way of misbehaving that got the attention of the other horses and seemed to make them act up as well. For my place, I have decided to try to capture the sounds of the barn during Lucky’s turnout.

The How-To: I did this assignment after I had done my other audio assignments, so I was fairly familiar with Audacity by this point. The assignment suggests using FreeSound.Org for audio clips so I did that. Their site is free, you just have to register and make an account first so I made an account. Once I had made my account and was logged in, I started searching for sounds.

Now, the barn that I grew up with had a large cement center aisle with stalls on either side. Surrounding the barn were several very large paddocks (like 5+ acres per paddock). So, I wanted to capture the sounds of Lucky’s hooves on the cement aisle. I also wanted to capture the frantic whinnies of the horses in the stalls on either side of the aisle, as Lucky seems to intentionally rile them up and taunt them with his calls. I also wanted to depict the sound of the horses in the paddock whinnying from afar and galloping up to greet him as he is turned out for the evening. To incorporate all of these sounds, I searched for a variety of horse related audio clips on Free sound. Some of my search terms where “whinnying” “horses” “galloping” “neighing” and so on.

When I found a clip or clips I liked I downloaded them. Fortunately most of them were already wav files, but a few were mp4 which I had to convert to a wav file. Once all of my files were the right format I opened them all on Audacity. I used the effects tab to make the galloping sound far away, and I put the hooves against cement sound towards the beginning of the clip to represent him being led down the barn aisle. Most of the other editing I did was sheerly my own personal preference/what I thought sounded best. (essentially it was a lot of adjusting the volume of the different clips to make it sound better). The end result sounds fairly chaotic, but so did the barn during Lucky’s turn out, so I guess I did a good job…?

Lastly, when I was finished editing my video, I downloaded it to my computer and uploaded it to SoundCloud. I tagged it with ds106 and the appropriate audio assignment tag. I added a photo of Mr. Lucky Ducky for good measure.