A note on the most recent episode of Welcome to Night Vale, #230
This episode was, I believe, the 11th anniversary of the show. This means it was about ten years ago I was on vacation in Wales with my wife, where I wrote the albums Madoc and Taran Wanderer. It was while on this trip - knowing I was about to lose my day job at a rapidly sinking book publisher - that I first received a communication from a fan in Brazil asking for my permission to use music in a Portuguese “fan translation” of the podcast. The fact that the show had reached so far away and inspired people to translate it was, in retrospect, one of the first signs of what was to come, which ended up completely changing my life. But at the time I simply thought it was neat and moved on, and we spent days tromping through sheep pastures looking at cairns and standing stones in a remote corner of Ynys Mon. While doing so, we encountered a rusty old farm gate that sang a particularly haunting song as it opened and closed, which I recorded. I thought it would be cool to use that sound in this season finale episode, and so it’s what I used (well, a small fragment of it) to play a new version of the main theme music. I thought the sound ending up working well atmospherically with the episode as well.
If you’d like to use that sound yourself, you can grab it here: https://freesound.org/people/earwicker23/sounds/193712/
Also, I’m not going to spoil the plot of the episode but it concludes in a rather dramatic fashion and required a specific sound design element. I’ll admit it had me stumped for a few days, but here’s what I did. I had a canvas sack filled with a few ice packs that had melted, effectively they were just little plastic pouches of water. I dropped this from a height of about eight feet, landing 1.5 feet from the microphone (an sm58). That’s source one. Source two was a ziploc bag filled with a mix of wet and dry cheerios, plus an egg, crushed by foot. The two sources were each slowed down very slightly and then combined, with the first source somewhat louder. So there you go, in case you ever need to do… that.
Freesound: collaborative database of creative-commons licensed sound for musicians and sound lovers. Have you freed your sound today?
