Toaster sound effects
I remember being a vampire in that I never slept normal hours. I guess this is a normal part of any college student’s life, but the giddiness associated with lack of sleep brings back some fond memories. It was Senior Year and my sound design class required a final group project. We were assigned a film clip without sound and asked to design sound around that clip, from scratch. In the end, no two projects told the same story, which taught us the importance of sound. Anyway, the funny part was that we only had two weeks to complete the project, and all 4 people in our assigned group had very different class schedules and extracuricular committments. The only time we could meet in the studio to record and mix was a 1am-4am time block. My commitment was as a morning news anchor, the 5am-7am shift, so some mornings I rolled right from the edit suite to the radio station. We were trying to imply the house in our video clip was being visited by a ghost, so we needed a ton of creepy sound effects. My hand-me-down toaster oven had a really creaky door, so I volunteered to bring it to the studio. We had technical difficulties that night, and didn’t get around to recording the toaster door. I carried that damn toaster back and forth from the Newhouse II building to Euclid Avenue 3 times before we finally got the recording right! I completely remember that final morning, walking from Newhouse to the radio station with my toaster oven under my arm at 4am, after pulling a full week of all-nighters. Beyond caring about fashion, I was wearing my pajama bottoms in lieu of appropriate campus attire, which everyone at the radio station was used to by now but appeared newly strange as I walked in with a toaster oven in hand. The on-air DJ couldn’t stop poking fun at the site of me, and my sleep-deprived response was to sing “Me and My Toaster Oven” to the tune of “Me and My Shadow” while tap dancing with full -on “jazz hands.” It would have translated much better on TV.