Make It 800% Slower had me take a song and slow it down by 800%. I used Andy Mckee’s acoustic guitar tune “Hunter’s Moon”. This assignment was pretty simple for me, but hey, four stars is four stars.

I used Reaper Studio for this. I tried doing it with Audacity first, but it kept crashing on me. In Reaper, there’s a slider on the UI that controls the sound. I just slid it over to 800% and I was done.

For this assignment you had to make a song 800% slower.

I used the song Gold by Kiiara. After slowing it down the song was thirty minutes long, so I had to shorten it down to fifteen minutes to get it to download.

The end effect of slowing the song down makes it sound distorted and kind of creepy. It sounds completely different and abstract and is impossible to make any of the words out. By slowing it down the song turned into something completely different and sounds like less of a song and more like creepy sound effects.

For this assignment we had to make a song 800% slower in hopes of making sound tranquil. I picked the song Georgia on my Mind by Ray Charles because I thought the song was already peaceful so it would be perfect. It came out well except when I tried to slow down to 800% the Audacity program kept crashing (probably because of my computer), so this is slowed down to about 550%. I still got the same effect and it sounds really cool. To do this I used audacity and went to the change tempo option in effects. I just slid the tempo bar to the left and it tells you what percentage you’re at.

The goal of this assignment was to create a piece of ambient music by slowing down an existing song by around 800%. As I was flipping through my Spotify, I came across Ride by 21 Pilots. While the beginning has a couple sharp drum attacks, which I knew wouldn’t take kindly to being slowed down, I felt the tune would produce interesting results.

Link to Assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/make-it-800-slower/

Stars: 4

Process: After grabbing the mp3 of the song, I loaded it into Adobe Audition. I applied the Stretch & Pitch process, setting the song length to be 800% of the original version. I then selected the first 2 minutes and saved them to upload in the interest of SoundCloud storage space.

I liked the idea of playing around with recognizable songs, altering their structure to create a totally new tone or atmosphere.  Sometimes the best way to understand a concept or medium is to simply work with it.  So I decided to try my hand at the Make it 800% Slower assignment.  I will say that the process was much more difficult than I anticipated.  I had previously used MPEG Streamclip to capture songs from YouTube videos, and originally thought I’d try to grab Mind Heist.  However, it appears that something has changed over the last few years… as almost all the files I tried to open were the “wrong file type”.  Google searching solutions yielded nothing.  I almost decided to give up the assignment completely, until I remembered that YouTube has a free video library where you can download MP3 files.  I then found a free copy of the very dramatic 1812 overture.  Perfect.  Mellowing this classic dramatic piece was definitely a fun exercise.  However, my first attempts at slowing the piece down were not particularly successful.  I attempted to slow it down (with an effect that altered audio speed) by 99%, but this merely resulted in Audacity crashing twice.  I then decided to simply slow it down 50%, and then adjust it again to 75%.  I attempted to play around with the pitch some, but I’m not sure I was entirely successful in creating a normal-sounding song.  However, the result is a somewhat eerie techno-sounding piece that is almost unrecognizable from the original (which was ultimately the goal).

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Let’s get started on these audio assignments! For the first one I’m doing Make it 800% Slower, which entails, as might be expected, making a song 8 times slower. Since most songs hover around the 3-5 minute mark, most of them end up around 24-40 minutes when stretched out. Naturally, I decided to use the longest song I have on my computer, Human Sadness by Julian Casablancas+The Voidz.

It ended up being a staggering hour and twenty-seven minutes long. The file’s over 80MB. Fortunately, it looks like recent versions of Audacity have directly incorporated Paulstretch, so I didn’t need to use any third-party software to stretch the song out like this. I think it turned out really nicely! It’s super ambient and ethereal, even moreso than the original song. Now I dare you to listen to the entire thing.

This audio assignment I chose for this post was  taking a song and making it a lot slower.

Sometimes when you have a beautiful piece of work, you do not think to alter it. However, changing the tempo or speed of a song can truly create a new masterpiece on its own. Sia has a beautiful, haunting voice that has always captivated me. The song Titanium has been one of my favorite songs for many years because of the vocals and the message. To me, the song in its original form portrays the idea that people will try to push you down or break you, but be strong enough to stand on your own and be your own person.

The song I chose to slow down was Titanium by David Guetta Ft. Sia

I really love this song and I thought Sia’s voice would sound beautifully haunting slowed down. Here is the final project:

Slowing a song down like this does remove the initial message, but it also creates a beautiful, creative piece of art that gives the song an entirely different meaning! When I slowed down Titanium, it took me to a place of sadness and sorrow. While this was my initial reaction, I really enjoyed listening to it and found it to be very captivating.

I chose this assignment because I liked the idea of creating something different and unique. I would have never imagined the song would song like this slowed down, but I love it! I encourage everyone to try something different like this assignment and recreate an unexpected masterpiece!

The Process

The process to create this feature was quite simple. First, I opened Audacity and uploaded the original song by going to IMPORT-AUDIO and selecting the music file:

Next, I went to EFFECT-CHANGE TEMPO and moved the cursor down to -90.000%

Now you are ready to export the file!

Go to FILE- EXPORT AUDIO:

Choose your title and format as a .WAV format:

Then you are done!

For my last assignment bank post of the week I did a 4 1/2 star assignment. This brought me to 11 stars total for the week with 8 of those stars dedicated to my character. For this assignment called your theme song we had to create our theme song, but I created I theme song for my character Rancher Bob. I started it off with a rooster because that is what he wakes up to everyday on the ranch. I also added a horse neigh and I little bit of gun shooting to try to get the coyotes off his farm and away from his cattle. The background music is just something I got from freesound.org that I thought sounded western. I then worked with audacity to put these all together. I am sort of happy how it turned out. I did the best I could with my sub par audacity skills.