This technique is popular on social media, particularly for sharing audio-only content such as podcasts. The animated waveform indicates there is audio content, which prompts the viewer to turn on their sound, and provides a visual focus for the duration of the audio.
This week's @ELHChallenge is 𝗚𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗘-𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗤𝘂𝗶𝘇 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿. This demo uses an 'audio waveform' theme to test your knowledge of movie sound effects. pic.twitter.com/ZXyiFhRjn9
— ᴊ ᴏ ɴ ᴀ ᴛ ʜ ᴀ ɴ_ʜ ɪ ʟ ʟ (@DevByPowerPoint) March 6, 2022
Circular reasoning
This striking effect immediately caught my imagination. The moving shape reminded me of a speaker cone or a person’s mouth and I began prototyping this week’s demo, based on a shelved idea for a previous challenge. I finally had a way to visually depict the Wilhelm Scream.
A lesson from history
The Wilhelm Scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in a number of films and TV series, beginning in 1951 with the film Distant Drums. The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height or is thrown from an explosion. The sound is named after Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 Western in which the character gets shot in the thigh with an arrow.
The Wilhelm Scream was popularised by the motion picture sound designer Ben Burtt, who first used it in Star Wars and then spent the next decade incorporating it into other movies he worked on, including the Indiana Jones series. The sound effect soon became an in-joke in the movie industry and to date has featured in at least 342 movies according to IMDB.
This is the kind of pop culture trivia that I really enjoy and I had long fostered the idea of using the Wilhelm Scream as the topic for an E-Learning Heroes Challenge.
Scream if you want to go faster
For this week’s demo, I have modified Storyline’s default ‘double confirmation‘ quiz format by:
- Removing the SUBMIT button on the question slides
- Triggering SUBMIT based on the state of a button
- Playing videos only when triggered, based on the learner's answer
This creates a fast-moving interaction with a cleaner layout, as the learner’s answer is registered instantly and all of the action takes place ‘in slide’.
When we feel more certain about a question we tend to answer more quickly. In this way, accepting only the learner’s first answer – their ‘gut instinct’ – can help to reinforce their prior knowledge and highlight any gaps in their understanding.
I have found this ‘one click’ approach to quiz design is most effective when you also provide the learner with instant feedback. If you can align this feedback to the theme of your course, even better.
A successful experiment?
To emphasise the audio elements, I built a simple monochrome user interface to frame the circular waveform. The curved text forms a ‘mouth’, and these elements open and close depending on the learner’s last answer. Finally, I added the ‘tonsils’ and ‘tongue’ icons to the correct and incorrect layers. (It’s surprising what you can find in Storyline’s icon library!)
The Wilhelm Scream is in the public domain and I downloaded it from here. The cough you hear when you enter an incorrect answer is from Freesound.org, and is also provided on a CC0 licence.
My demo has been described by members of the E-Learning Heroes Community as ‘fun’, ‘creative’ and ‘crisp and clever’, and the way it provides ‘immediate feedback’ has also been well-received.
For a quick experiment that allowed me to get some more practice with Adobe After Effects, I am very pleased with this feedback. Let me know what you think in the comments too.
