Changing the Mood With Custom Music Creation

If you’ve created many Photo Stories or read
Adding Music from the
Beginner’s Guide to Photo Story then you know that you can create
custom music from many built-in options. This mini-guide will show you
how you can change the emotion of your stories by changing the mood of the
custom music.

Emotional Rollercoaster

Some of the best stories are those that are able to affect a
wide range of emotions. While images can certainly convey different
emotions, music is even more emotional by nature. We often associate
music with emotions. Celebrations usually have faster-tempo music, while
ceremonial events have calm, slower tempo music.

You can use this to your advantage and Photo Story even helps
you out by naming the moods of the custom music.

Getting Started

Start by
Importing Photos into Photo Story. Arrange the pictures so that
they make sense (emotionally speaking) and so that they convey the story you
wish to tell. Once that is done, you’re ready to set the mood with music.

Obviously, you could always do this with some careful choosing
of own windows media audio files. The point of this article is to
highlight the Create Audio abilities of Photo Story. Not only can it set
the mood for a series of pictures, but the audio that it generates has a introduction,
a middle, and an end. What that means is that you have no
abrupt beginnings or endings and one mood can seamlessly transition into
another. In fact, that is what Photo Story is doing. It’s the
audible equivalent to the visual transitions that Photo Story provides.

Setting the Mood

Setting the mood in Photo Story is very easy. On the Add
Background Music slide, you can either select the slide and hit the Create
Music button, or right click the slide, open Music from the
context menu, and select Create…

This will bring up the Create Music window.

Photo Story helps you find the music that you are looking for by
organizing the custom music. Genre is the most broad. You
can even set this to All to see all Styles. Once you find a
style, you can select the instruments, or bands that will be playing the
music. The next three settings will help tweak the music to the specific
mood that you are shooting for. Mood, tempo, and Intensity.
Play with the settings. Some sound similar to each other, but the
descriptive terms like “Adventurous” and “Tense” help you decide.

Don’t forget that the Custom music that you create will have a
beginning, middle, and end. Either set the duration of the slide you are
working to be long enough to include all of these elements (30 seconds minimum,
in my opinion), or set the total duration of the number of slides to be that
long (again, 30 seconds minimum).

You may not have known that you could create several pieces of
custom music. Now you know that not only is it possible to have custom
music for each slide, but you can use the mood and tempo to your advantage,
adding to the impact of your overall story.