Week 2

18-24 Jan 2016

Moderators: Carol Rainbow, An Nowak and Wynshel Corrigan

Building with sounds and scripts

Learn to create speaking poster boards, magnetic poetry, sound objects, touch items, touch to give notecard scripts. 

Objectives for week 2:

• Learn to modify given scripts to chat information in text
• Learn to add sounds to items
• Learn how to record sounds for Second Life 

Session 1

During this session we will learn to upload images and make poster boards. If people have not already got lindens to upload an image them images will be supplied. Scripts will be supplied and sound files in the first instance. 

To the poster boards we will add

• a text chat, for example saying what the picture is, so if the posters are clothes, the picture of the dress will chat in text something like "This is a party dress, I would wear this to go out."  The participants can make picture dictionaries with this facility.
• a sound file. Participants will be asked to use a sound recorder such as Audacity, which is free, to create a sound file to go into the poster board.

The home work will be to make a useful poster.  

The posters could include: a landmark giver - the script will be provided or maybe a poster board for new vocabulary.

NB - Experienced users could create magnetic poetry boards. Simple building tools will be needed in this case.

Session 2

At the start of the second session participants can share what they have made after the first session.

During this session we will concentrate on making touch items. Walk through spheres, touch 3D items such as animals which give a message, note card, chat information etc. This will be using all the skills learned in session 1 to make items for games.

An example:

A set of animals which could be placed around the sim, which, when clicked on give clues in a scavenger hunt.

NB Experienced users can make touch position boards such as the numbers, months, conversation boards.

Useful Information to make sound files for use in Second Life^R:

Recording with Audacity:

Using Audacity for recording sound files suitable for Second Life

Audacity is a powerful recording and editing tool which is freely available from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ . There is an online training guide http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/documentation and Torley's has made an Audacity tutorial https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417  

Making a vocal recording

•    Open Audacity and make sure that on the bottom left of the screen it says Project Rate: 44100. This is default so should already be right, if not click on the numbers to alter it.

•    Plug in a microphone and click the red Record button. This automatically creates a track and starts the recording.  

•    If you want to pause while recording click the Pause button. To continue recording on the same track, click the Pause button again. 

•    When you have finished recording, click the Stop button

•    You will now see a wav form, listen to it and note if there are sections that need to be taken out. Highlight an unwanted section and click on delete, note there is an undo in the edit menu of you get it wrong! Also delete the unrecorded space at the beginning and end of the sound. Make sure that the finished sound file is not more than 9.9 seconds,  that is all that Second Life can deal with.

•    Upload one sound to Second Life and try it in a poster to see if it is loud enough. If it is not you may need to amplify it. I usually test before making all of the sound files so that I can add the amplification process during the making, it is a pain to go back and add it later.

•    I usually amplify the sound by about 5 Db so that it is loud enough once in Second Life^R. To do that highlight the whole track, select Effects / Amplify/ accept the recommended amplification.  You will see the wav increase. 

NB You can only upload sounds up to 9.5 seconds long to Second Life^R.