Since it’s Halloween, I had my speakers on the porch again, playing spooky sounds. I use the LaserLight Digital’s 101 Digital Sound Effects – Sounds of Horror CD for my effects. I’ve had the CD for a few years now but this year I finally got the mix right.

Here’s what I played:

• Continuous loop – “Stormy Night”: thunder, wind, and rain.
• 17 second loop – “Wood Gate Creaking”: starts every 17 seconds.
• 17 second loop – One of “Terrified Scream – Man,” “Man Groaning”, or “Frightened Breathing” every 17 seconds
• 12 second loop – One of “Terrified Scream – Woman,” “Shrill Scream – Woman,” and “Owl Hooting” every 12 seconds.

On my Linux box, that’s four separate instances of mplayer running at once. In one window, for instance, I did this:

while [ 1 ]; do mplayer LaserLight_Digital-Wood_gate_creaking.ogg; sleep 17; done

In another I ran this:

while [ 1 ]; do for i in LaserLight_Digital-Terrified_Scream__Woman.ogg LaserLight_Digital-Shrill_Scream__Woman.ogg LaserLight_Digital-Owl_Hooting.ogg; do mplayer $i; sleep 12; done; done

In hindsight, I should’ve moved one of the players from 17 seconds to something that didn’t match the other, so that they would play out of sync.

Right before 9 AM, I had a group of teenage girls venture up onto the front porch. As the spooky sounds are playing, I put my alien mask on and slowly opened the door. You should’ve heard the screams! I took my mask off and laughed my head off! It was the highlight of the night.

Next year, I’ll put up a ghost and get some other spooky additions. I eat this stuff up!