Jun 25, 20152 min read

Sentimental soundboard: cassette player and movie quotations

What a sound-tastic e-learning challenge has Articulate announced the previous week. It was all about soundboards, which usually feature funny quotes, one-liners or phrases from pop culture.

As I sentimentally remember having cassettes and a classic tape recorder I decided to create an audio interaction around this almost retro-tech devices.

(click image to launch the interaction)

I searched for a nice cassettes image, worked on it in Photsohop, added some actors’ names using handwritten font (which is Tom Kuhlmann’s writing – you can download it from here) – so you can see 7 ready-to-play cassettes on the desk (7 layers in Storyline accordingly ). A number of things happen/appear when you click every cassette:

a post-it note with the quotation from the movie appears...
...together with a photo of the actor, who’s saying the sentence
a tape recorder is playing the quotation audio
cassette rolls are spinning (Storyline 2: two-spins animation)
Once the audio finishes:

the rolls stop spinning
the play/stop buttons switch
the switch audio effect is playing

I wanted to keep it as much realistic as possible, so thought these rolls and switches effects would be a nice touch. Both rolls and the play/stop buttons were cut out from the original image and pasted in the exactly same place as the original elements.

I downloaded the quotation mp3 from here and the switching effect I found on Freesfx site.

Thank you all of Articulate’s community fellow, who commented this project. My favourite comment on this entry is written by Chuck Jones from Learning Onions:

“Joanna, the way you designed this reinforces the point of two pathways into the brain. I got to hear the quote - and see the words on screen and the photo of who said them. I got to watch the tape reels roll. And I got to see the button switch the player off at the end of the recording. All of this to say that while this challenge focuses on audio, it's important for users to see something as well - to keep their whole mind engaged.”

As always – I’m looking forward to your feedback and get in touch if you have any questions.