Audio Urban Legend

Our second Pressure Project challenged us to tell a narrative using audio as the star of the show. This narrative could be in any form, and at the recommendation of telling an urban legend, I was inspired to make a sound score of a classic urban legend that I used to hear at ~literally~ every bonfire of my childhood.

The urban legend takes many forms, but it generally involves a couple driving out to a make-out point only to be interrupted by a serial killer with a hook hand. With this narrative in mind, I started to rummage through FreeSounds.org for the meat of my story, and once I had found them I layered the audio using GarageBand. By using a grab-bag of sounds from different user sources on the website, I felt as though I was embracing the piecemeal nature of urban legends to shift over time and space — how the same urban legend can have slightly different details depending on who tells it.

Working with the one-minute time constraint was the mos

t difficult part of this project, particularly because this specific urban legend sources it’s fear from the loneliness and uncanny duration of the girl’s wait in the car after her boo has excused himself for a pee break. The story thrives off of the building of tension, and this is hard to do in such a short amount of time. In an attempt to remedy this constraint, I experimented with volume and panning of the tracks as well as cross-fading to elude to the idea of time passing. With more than five hours, I think I could have done a better job of this.

Similarly, I think that I could have clarified the latter half of the score better as it left many people confused and left the story unresolved for some. I was referencing this version of the urban legend (told at the 47 second mark):

…but some versions of the story that others in the class had heard either didn’t end this way or ended slightly differently. The pros and cons of the fluidity of these urban legends…

Feel free to check out the audio narrative by clicking here and please comment with any suggestions you might have for me to improve upon this project!