I chose to do the Make It 800% Slower assignment and to be on theme I decided to use the song, Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (1987) by Starship. I chose this song for the year but also because it’s one of my favorite songs. It took me a while to figure out how to adjust the pitch and everything when I slowed the track down but I’m happy it is finally complete!
Check it out!
One of the assignments I chose this week was the Make it 800% Slower assignment. For this assignment I took a popular 80s song, Don’t Stop Believing by Journey, and slowed it down to turn it into something else. I didn’t slow the song down all the way to 800% because I felt that if any audio was slowed down by that much it would all sound the same. I slowed the song down by a lot though and I got something that could maybe be used for a project on horror or just some eerie background noise.
I slowed down Meltdown by Ponette by 800% and got a super cool sound.
This was the first assignment I chose to do this week and man was it an interesting one! The basic gist of this one was to take any song and slow it down a ton and see what it sounds like. For a while now I have loved the song Secrets by One Republic. The instrumental intro to the song is amazing to me and so great to listen to. I wanted to find out what it would sounds like slowed down so much (I really had no idea what it would sound like). So for this whole week I decided to use Audacity and found that it is a super useful tool. The first thing to do is open Audacity and import the MP3 of WAV file for the song that you want to use. It should look something like this when you import your song. For each song the highs and lows will be different so that will look a little different.
Next you click on the track in Audacity, go up to the Effects tab and choose change tempo. We want to set the percent to -98% because we are slowing down the song. If you put a positive number in there, it will speed up the song. Also, make sure you check the box for “Use high quality stretching.” It makes the end result a bit cleaner.
Click ok and let it do its thing (it will take a while). When it is done stretching the song out. It will probably be super long (in my case it ended up somewhere around 3 hours). To fix this, you can simply highlight the parts you don’t want and hit the scissors icon (cut). And that is it! You have your slowed down song. And in my case, the end result was amazing. By slowing down the orchestral intro to the song, it made it so deep and powerful. The sound echoes and is so empowering. It is almost like there is a song within each song. By slowing down one song, I got a completely different one that is just as amazing as the original. Give it a listen here:
If you slow the song down by 800%, you’ll hear a secret message. Oddly enough, the song is Icelandic pop sensation BABBA’s Disc– I mean, Swedish supergroup ABBA’s Dancing Queen. I’ve always been a big fan of hidden messages. When I was a kid, I remember finding out about backmasking: playing records backward. Hearing Stairway to Heaven backwards for the first time scared the heck out of me. How’d they do that? Was it on purpose? Did someone just come up with those words and make me believe it? Or how about the Beatles – is Paul dead or what? He’s obviously been replaced. The songs say so when you play them backwards. It’s cold. hard. fact. Yup.
Then there are ghost voices… voices that come through when you don’t expect them, or when you ask them to. It’s even scarier to think that you could be filming a video, recording a speech or a song, and inadvertently capture someone else on the tape. It’s not you putting in a hidden message, but someone who is still hidden, and trying to come through. And you never know where you might find it. So, about that ABBA song… what did I find at 1 minute, 45 seconds into the classic refrain?
These are the steps I took to find the hidden message within.
It was kinda spooky, right?
Shifting fully out of the story (I had a hard time deciding whether to include a mini-walkthrough in the story itself… as you can see I went for it), here is some more info on how I made the clip and why I made the changes that I did. I used this website to convert the video itself to mp3 for download. The additional sounds I used for this clip are Glitch 08, static noise, and Hello?. All are from freesound.org.
As for the extra audio that I inserted – when I slowed the song down and listened to about half of it, I thought to myself… “this is kind of boring.” I have listened to a handful of other super-slowed-down songs before and enjoyed them as background music or if I was in the mood for some ambient stuff. But I didn’t think there was much I could build around it other than “here’s a song I slowed down for the assignment.” Putting in extra audio and making it a sort of ghost story made it seem a little more fun, to me at least.
Finally, here’s a gallery of how I edited in the extra audio.
This assignment was called make it 800% slower and was worth 3.5 stars.
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/make-it-800-slower/
For this assignment you put a song in audacity and slowed it down by 800%. This was a really interesting assignment because you got to hear the song at regular speed and then way slower. I really liked how this one turned out. I found a cool French type of song on a royalty free website and put it in Audacity. Then I went to the effects tool and slowed it down. Â This assignment was really cool to do.
When life gives you lemons, you try to make a song 800% slower. Make it 800% Slower instructed me to choose a song and try to make that song 800% slower. The assignment was rated 4 stars which I think was pretty accurate. First I went to YouTube and choose the song ” Touch” by Little mix. I listen to this song like everyday so I decided why not make it slower. I copied the URL of the YouTube video and convert it to mp3 form. I transferred the mp3 to Audacity and following the instruction on the assignment I tried to change the tempo of the song. However Audacity keep on not responding and after so many tries I gave up. So I decided to search the internet for an easier program that will slow my song and as a result I found the site:
This allowed me to slow down the song to 800% so all I had to do was paste the mp3 to the program and move the cursor to 800% and after a few minutes the program made the song much slower. After that I saved the new 800% song and loaded it to Soundcloud. It is crazy how the results sound like a new song all together moving away from the original song so I am going to put the original song below for comparison.
original song:
800% slower:
I never really liked the Make It 800% Slower assignment. It usually results in a never ending drone, and people give themselves 4 stars for what is little more than a click of a button. However, I thought I might try taking the Monster Magnet song “Hallelujah” (YT) and slow the tempo by half. Maybe then I could try to figure out how to play in on a banjo or something. But then I had the idea to layer the full speed and half speed versions together – by visually lining up the first beat, the others should fall into place. The result is noisy, but not quite as cacophonous as one might expect. Because I used the change tempo function, it didn’t change the pitch, so it sounds in tune and in time. The song has layered voices anyway, so this just added a few more. I delayed the entry of the full speed version by a few measures, so the slow vocals kick in first and then the faster ones over take them after a bit.
It seemed like an interesting experiment, although I’m not sure if I can take it anywhere. I also took a screen recording of it and made it a video, for what it’s worth:
Making something slower or faster changes it into something very different to what it started. In this assignment, the task is to slow down a piece of music to the point where ‘it becomes an amazing piece of ambient music‘.
Using Adobe Audition I uploaded, “That’s Not my Name” by the Ting Tings and slowed the song down to 800%.
The outcome is slightly unsettling, to say the least. It’s strange how the tempo of a song being completely changed has such an effect on the mood of the piece making it seem very disturbing. I seem to be starting a theme with this blog of how to make things very distressing.
