This column is a series designed to help enhance your PowerPoint presentations. Each edition pinpoints common pitfalls faced when planning, preparing, and presenting PowerPoint shows.
Pitfall: Unimaginative Show Lacking Music or Sound Effects
Imagine a movie without any music or sound effects. Would Top Gun grab your attention if Tom Cruise took off from the aircraft carrier without the roar of the jet and the dynamic “Danger Zone” music? Most of us would consider such a movie as a step backwards in time.
Even though we love the amazing power of music and sound effects, we often present our PowerPoint shows with nothing more than our human voice accompanying the projected images.
To purge the pitfall: Incorporate appropriate music and/or sound effects into your shows. Inserting a sound file is as easy as inserting a photograph or illustration. You simply click “Insert” > “Sound” (or “Music and Sound” for PPT 2003) > “Sound From File” > then navigate to the appropriate folder containing the sound file and select the file. You can “tweak” the music/sound effects to meet your specific needs by following the directions in a PowerPoint manual or on Microsoft’s online help site.
You may say, “But our organization cannot afford to buy the rights to music. So, if we were to incorporate music, we would run the risk of getting nailed for copyright infringement.” The solution to this problem may be found on the Internet. Sites such as www.freeplaymusic.com provide copyright free music for you to use. Make sure you follow the “Terms of Use” listed for your music source.
Pitfall: You Present Your Show and the Sound Does Not Work
Has the following scenario ever happened to you? You proudly get ready to demonstrate your new “sound” prowess yet when you get to the part of the show with sound, nothing happens! Panic ensues! The most common cause of this problem is that your sound files were stored in a different folder than your PowerPoint show when you inserted them into your show, yet you only brought the PowerPoint show folder with you to your presentation site.
To purge the pitfall: Before inserting a sound file into your show, copy the file to the same folder where you have been saving your PowerPoint show. Then insert the file into your show by navigating to this same folder and clicking the sound file. When you want to transfer your show to another computer in the future, simply copy the contents of your PowerPoint folder to a CD or thumb (USB) drive, then transfer the folder to the second computer. If you do not follow this procedure, you may forget to copy your sound files because they will exist in a different folder.
Final Thoughts
Appropriate music and sound effects capture and hold the attention of your audience. Be careful not to over use such special effects, however. They should help you reach your show’s objectives, not just add glitz.
Dr. Jon Hooper has over 30 years of experience helping natural and cultural resource professionals enhance the effectiveness of their communication efforts. He is a professor of environmental interpretation at California State University, Chico, and is the owner of Verbal Victories Communication Consulting. He is a Certified Interpretive Trainer (CIT) and was Project WILD’s national Facilitator of the Year in 2006. Contact Jon at jonkhooper@hotmail.com.
The problems with using sound in a PowerPoint show are the same problems with using PowerPoint at all: the technology makes it way to easy to put stuff together without foresight. I’ve heard too many presentations with “sound effects” of the same caliber as those awful spinning transitions between every slide. Whether it’s an imprecisely selected audio track, page full of whooshes, or a canned canned waterfall to “enhance” an otherwise stunning photo, I have to recommend to people to leave out the sounds unless the rest of the piece is well polished, the sound quality is good, and the message is truly enhanced. I think the advice “Don’t speak unless you can improve upon the silence” applies to presentation sounds, as well.
Thanks for these tips on using sounds in PP presentations. As you’ve illustrated, there’s plenty of strengths and pitfalls to using sound. We’d love to hear more tips at http://www.facebook.com/office
Cheers,
Andy
MSFT Office Outreach
There is a great tutorial and thousands of sounds for your powerpoint presentation. Yeah you have to have sounds or the presentation is lame to say the least. http://soundbible.com/powerpoint-sounds.php
Tip I use:
I ALWAYS place all media files in the same folder as the slide show BEFORE I include them in a slide. When I need to copy the slideshow, I copy the complete folder. It can be a little wasteful of space, but it can save a lot of embarrassment when you find the media doesn’t play.