Freesound Forums

The image below is from DeviantArt and has 31 drawing prompts - one for each day of October.

Why don't we adapt them into sound design challenges, and make sounds based on or inspired by the prompts?

...or in plaintext: 1. Spooky - 2. Pumpkin - 3. Cityscapes - 4. Corn - 5. Pumpkin Pie - 6. Origami - 7. Treats - 8. Orange - 9. Tangle - 10. Possessed - 11. Nightmare - 12. Scream - 13. Thirteen - 14. Moon - 15. Graveyard - 16. Scarecrow - 17. Spiderman - 18. Zombie - 19. Raven - 20. Orc - 21. Witch - 22. Aliens - 23. Thorny - 24. Vampire - 25. Hocus Pocus - 26. Demons - 27. Costume - 28. Owl - 29. Ghosts - 30. Mummy - 31. Halloween

01: "Spooky" - a spooky dissonant drone
02: "Pumpkin" - a remastering of billox30's recording of pumpkin seeds
03: "Cityscapes" - an artificial cityscape made by layering my own field recordings
04: "Corn" - a set of beats made from cornhusking and popcorn sounds
05: "Pumpkin Pie" - another set of beats made from a pumpkin pie tin
06: "Origami" - 5 rhythms made from paper-folding sounds
07: "Treats" - rhythms made from a candy wrapper
08: "Orange" - I attempt to make the sound of the color orange itself
09: "Tangle" - a set of weird melodies & rhythms made from tangled MIDI notes
10: "Possessed" - an exorcism scene with voice-overs and layered foley sounds (a full scene)
11: "Nightmare" - vampire metal (a full song)
12: "Scream" - bringing things back to silly Halloween territory
13: "Thirteen" - a less spooky piece made in 13-tone equal temperament (a full song)
14: "Moon" - a surrealistic and lunar soundscape
15: "Graveyard" - an outdoor night soundscape
16: "Scarecrow" - an animate scarecrow being attacked by a mob of crows
17: "Spider-Man" - spider-blues (a full song)
18: "Zombie" - the sound of BEING a zombie
19: "Raven" - a remix of dbache's raven sounds
20: "Orc" - dumb orc voices
21: "Witch" - slightly less dumb witch voices
22: "Aliens" - goofy alien/dino noises that then get transformed into vaguely xenomorphic sounds
23: "Thorny" - a soundscape for a thorn forest
24: "Vampire" - goofy vampire voices
25: "Hocus Pocus" - an enchanting but unsettling atmosphere
26: "Demons" - a VERY unsettling atmosphere
27: "Costume" - a costumed ball/monster party (a full song)
28: "Owl" - goofy owl rhythms
29: "Ghosts" - spooky ghost sounds!
30: "Mummy" - dry crackly mummy sounds!
31: "Halloween" - finale! (a full song)

UberDuck did most of the heavy-lifting ... https://freesound.org/people/Timbre/sounds/704751/

Haha! I dig it. I'm probably gonna have to resort to generators at some point, as well as remixing existing sounds. Tomorrow's challenge is "Corn". If I could, I'd go harvest some fresh, dry it, and make sounds/beats with the cornhusk. Instead I'll have to come up with something else.

This must be a good set of challenges because I feel my ability increasing each time. I always think "I don't have any objects relating to that" or "This won't work for actual music" but then it works out. I guess that's also the power of beat slicing. If you can make a rhythm or texture, you can make music!

The MIDI of Oct. 9 "Tangled" looks interesting. I don't often create MIDI this arcane.

It's spookier at half-speed ... https://freesound.org/people/Timbre/sounds/705266/

Awesome. There are some places in the world I've been where the distant traffic noise sounds like that, but with wavering pitch rather than a Shepard tone. Southern Alabama and Seattle come to mind. The rocks, trees, and changes of elevation smear the frequencies until they sound almost like alien craft.

For today's Drawtober prompt "possessed", I'm thinking of trying to make a fake exorcism and playing as both the priest and the possessed one. But movies depicting exorcism tend to have the possessed one using a lot of profanity so I have to figure out some other way to make it convincing. Maybe a lot of chair scrape sounds to suggest that the possessed one is tied down?

Well, possessed people often speak otherworldly/arcane languages, so you could make one up and go for that, the tone will infer the meaning...

Thanks, but I had already made the thing and gone to bed by the time of your post.

I'm migrating to a new PC, so it may be a short while before I can do another entry. Hopefully most of my plugins migrate over seamlessly and don't have a bunch of associated registry files, installers, etc.

Well THAT took way too long. It turned out some Windows update had broken things. So I updated again, and then everything suddenly worked.

Well, time to do 6 days of make-up work!

Well, I finished all the prompts. I had quite a lot of fun with them! Sometimes I had to really stretch to make a sound fit a prompt, but I do think just about any kind of art prompt can be adapted to a sound prompt.

Cheers