Relax. Take an Ambient.

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Make it 800% Slower-3.5

Music producer Nick Pittsinger slowed Bieber’s “U Smile” down 800% and the result was ethereal magic. Find a song to experiment with and slow it down to the point where it becomes an amazing piece of ambient music. If doing this with Audacity or any other non-linear digital editor, you’ll likely have to perform multiple lengthings of the song. Be sure to pitch shift so that even though the track is longer, it doesn’t become just a low pitched version (think of the sound used in a slow-mo moment of someone yelling Nooooooo).

This assignment looked fun and it gave me the chance to learn something new because I wasn’t sure how to slow down the song without making it sound absolutely horrible.

The Work Itself

The Story Behind the Story

Attempting to make ambient proved to be a difficult task and it certainly did not have the same effect as the example used in the prompt. However, I believe it has a relaxing tone to it at times and is that type of song you can just lay in your bed and stare at the ceiling for hours while listening to it. The actual song is “Obvious Bicycle” by Vampire Weekend. I would say most of their music is the type you can listen to and automatically relax but by making the song ambient, it is even more so relaxing. It’s important for each person to take a step back from life and relax for awhile and this song is just the way to get started.

Narrating the Process

So the assignment suggested we use PaulStretch to create the desired ambient effect. I did not like the sound it made, it was too harsh and it took forever to convert the song into PaulStretch. So I looked for a different route. I noticed there was one tutorial for this assignment so I used that one instead. It was quite simple. All it requires is going to Effect –> Change Tempo and then adjusting the song to as slow as you would like. This can be seen in the screenshots below. To put it perspective, the original song is only a little over four minutes long. By changing the tempo, I extended the time to almost 17 minutes.

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Slow down turned disaster

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Music producer Nick Pittsinger slowed Bieber’s “U Smile” down 800% and the result was ethereal magic. Find a song to experiment with and slow it down to the point where it becomes an amazing piece of ambient music. If doing this with Audacity or any other non-linear digital editor, you’ll likely have to perform multiple […]

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Make it 800% Slower (3 stars)

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I like the audio assignments since I am pretty familiar with the Audacity software after using it to finish my assignments. I am an old fashion person and like to listen to classical songs so I found this free music software, Ave Maia from Amazon. This reminds me of how I listened to my oldest daughter play the piano when she was little. How could a piece of music be so beautiful?! I downloaded it to my computer. Then, I used Audacity to open the song and cut a couple parts from the beginning and end of the song. I thought it would be too long if I used the whole song. After I changed the speed to 99% slower, the song stretched from 1minute and 35 seconds to 2 hours and 39 minutes. I only changed it to 100% slower and it took 30 minutes. I don’t know how the person who created the assignment did 800% slower! Then, I started to listen to the new stretched song; I was unable to learn anything from the first 15 minutes so I stopped it. I think I picked the wrong song to stretch. Instead I picked a slow and soft song instead of a fast beat song. But I didn’t want to give up so I undid the change speed and set up a new speed of 45% slower. The song was turning out great. I am glad I tried one more time. Lesson learned!

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Let’s Take it Slowwww

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For 3 stars this week, I completed the 800% Slower Assignment.

I have come to learn that Audacity hates me. In order to keep the smoothness of the track, I slowed down the track using the Paulstretch effect under the effects menu. After I made some rough calculations, it was slowed down by 40%. At this point, the track went from being ~4 minutes to ~2.5 hours. I then tried to slow it down even further, and when I applied the Paulstretch, it took 3 hours to apply to the whole track. Once it was completed, Audacity would always quit, and break, and UGH!! It was so annoying! From now on, I think I will stick to tracks that are less than 10 minutes or so in length. Lesson learned.

Here is the original song:

And here is the slowed down version:

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Make it Slower

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This is an Audio Assignment and it was worth 4 stars. The task for this audio assignment was to slow down a song that you enjoy by 800%. I chose to do Lay All Your Love On Me by ABBA. I have been on this ABBA binge for the past month so I thought it would be most appropriate to take on one of my favorite songs. I used Audacity like I did for all the Audio Assignments this week and then I used the Paulstretch effect and the song ended up being 45 min. long! It is haunting and mostly sounds like a bunch of slithering snakes.

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Slowin’ it way down- Audio assignment 1423

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The final audio assignment I did this week was 3 stars entitled “Make it 800% slower.” For this assignment you have to take a song and slow it down to make it sound almost like classical music. The example was U Smile by Justin Bieber. I decided to do Life Happens by Brandon and Leah.

I was trying to figure out how to get a YouTube video into Audacity so I googled it. And this is what I found:

Step 1: Install ClipGrab. First of all, you need to install ClipGrab . …

Step 2: Copy the video link. …

Step 3: Insert the video link in ClipGrab. …

Step 4: Select download format and quality. …

Step 5: Grab that clip!

So I installed ClipGrab, but couldn’t figure out how to open it, it just kept installing. So I just recorded the song from my phone to Audacity.

While trying to figure out how to get a YouTube video to Audacity (PS if you have any advice please share) I looked at blog post from other people who did this assignment and I found a blog that was helpful in another way. Although the blog, that the blog I was reading, got the information from was shut down, she summed up what she learned enough for me to use their information. She states

Instead of changing the speed of the song using the :change speed button” he suggested that instead you use the “paulstretch” effect. Which basically slows down the song without changing the pitch.

After discovering this glorious tool, the assignment became much easier.

So the first thing I did was play around with the “paulstretch” effect. This effect took approximately 20 minutes to change the original recording, so I was hoping I got it right the first time! And I did! The stretched version sounds very haunted and like a spooky scene in a movie. It seems to be very heavily played by a violin. Because it takes so long to save and upload the videos I’m only going to upload a portion of the stretched version because it is over 2 and a half hours long. Also the song just repeats itself the whole time, so it’s basically the same thing just repeated. I shorted it to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. I felt like that length encompassed a good amount of sound and was short enough to listen to the whole thing and long enough to get a good idea of how the song sounds slowed down.

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Fuzzy Blue Lights, dragging;

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For this audio assignment, I slowed Fuzzy Blue Lights by Owl City down by 40%. It still has it’s audio integrity, but is much slower than the original.

3 Stars.

Fuzzy Blue Lights is one of my absolute favorite Owl City songs. It is off the album Of June and has helped me fall asleep more nights than I can count. I converted the mp3 to a .wav online and uploaded it to audacity. I had first dropped the tempo -99% but it crashed audacity, so I figured that was too slow. I dropped the tempo -40% and here is the result.

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Slow Motion Spill on the Party

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For Week Two: Audio Week of the Prisoner106 digital storytelling course, I poked around in the Audio Assignment Bank looking for some new tasks that I’ve not attempted before. Rather than just looking for some generic tasks, I set myself the goal of finding assignments that I could apply specifically to the context of The Village.

The first such task that appealed to me was Audio Assignment 1423: Make it 800% Slower, submitted by Michael Branson Smith (@mbransons). His example of a Bieber song slowed way down (but without a change in pitch) produces a bizarre and surreal result. It seemed to me that taking something from The Prisoner and changing it up might be a fun challenge.

Wanting to ensure a radical difference between the original and the transformed sound, I have selected the “Party Dress” song that appears in Arrival, as it has a very upbeat and cheery melody. You can give the original a listen here:

Looking to keep the audio work simple, I launched Audacity and imported the original file.

First Attempt:
My first attempt (not reading the complete instructions for the assignment) had me attempting to apply a Change Tempo effect of -99%. That promptly caused Audacity to hang. Arg. Clearly increasing the length of the audio file that significantly would take a lot of processing time. (The file would have gone from 137 seconds (just over 2 minutes) to 13795 seconds (230 minutes). Yeah. A bit long.)

Second Attempt:
For my second attempt, I took only the first 30 seconds of the song, and paid closer attention to the stated length of the resulting transformed file, selecting a Change Tempo factor of -90. This caused the original 29.86 seconds of extracted audio to expand to 298.61 seconds. This processed just fine, and resulted in this interesting audio.

The Change Tempo effect at this magnitude clearly introduced an interesting “chop” to the music.

Third Attempt:
For my third attempt, I applied only a Change Tempo factor of -50%, which effectivly doubled the clip to 59.72 seconds. The theme was noticeably slowed, but still easily recognized.

Fourth Attempt:
For the fourth attempt, I again applied a -50% to the third attempt, and around that time looked back at the instructions and saw reference to the “Paulstretch” effect. I applied that on top and suddenly had something quite different, and without the “chop” of the Change Tempo attempts.

Fifth Attempt:
For the fifth attempt I took the original 30 second file and applied the Paulstretch effect directly, with the default stretch factor of 10.

Sixth Attempt:
To see what might happen with a second application of the Paulstretch effect, I again applied it on top of the previous attempt, and obtained this as a result.

Comments:
Each of these attempts is unique. The results from the second attempt (Change Tempo -90%) and PaulStretchxPaulstretch (at factor 10) produce two remarkably different results. It would be interesting to continue to play around to see how other effects in Audacity can result in significantly different sounds. There is documentation here about the Audacity Effects Menu and the Effects, Generators, and Analyzers. Clearly, there are a lot of different products that can be made from one initial audio file. This assignment is an open invitation to continue to explore the wide range of transformations hiding in the Effects menu. That could make up a whole course alone on Audio.

Which of the 5 results do you like the most?

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Making some Adjustments

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As I had to get up early this morning I though I might make good use of my time. I popped into the Village shop and bought a screwdriver.

I wanted to have a closer look at the TV in my accommodation after last night’s blip.

I also need to get some more credits and decided on doing a wee bit of audio work. I am still trying to get an understanding of The Village by looking under the bonnet.

I had already taken a bit of audio from on of the surveillance tapes:

I ran it through the reverse filter in audacity:

Which was interesting and make some sort of sense if you are in a hypnagogia state. But it required further investigation. I found some instructions which lead to a new tool to add to my toolbox. PaulStretch is quite fascinating, and after spending quite some time testing the settings I fell back on the basic preset:

Feeding this into some video footage from the archives:

Tells us quite a lot about the state of Rover’s mind, or perhaps his master’s?

Some information

Movie clips extracted with MPEGStreamclip from video taken from dvd with HandBrake.

Movie clips concatenated with ffmpeg.

Slowed down with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i rovercon.mov -filter:v "setpts=4.0*PTS" rovercon.mp4
Which turned into mp4 too

Added the stretched audio:

ffmpeg -i rovercon.mp4 -i the-prisoner-backwards-strech.mp3 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -shortest rovercon-audio.mp4

I am finding ffmpeg interesting as you can try different variations out quickly.

Rover normally seems to be a cold mechanical creature, this view suggests something deeper, organic perhaps, hints of ancient chants and secrets. Perhaps the Village is not as rational as we think.

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Let’s take it slow

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I began this assignment (worth 3 stars), with one thing in mind: to make the Game of thrones theme even more epic than it already is. How would I do this? By making the it go even slower!

Look at that big, beautiful throne. I want it (Basically the plot of the whole series).

So why choose a theme to a series known for it’s violent tendencies, and controversial scenes all wrapped in one? Because it’s iconic. No, I’m not saying this because I happen to love the series, I’m saying this because theme songs for any TV show are probably the most recognizable thing connected to it. If I ask you about let’s say FRIENDS, what is one of the fisrt things that come to mind?

It would be the iconic guitar riff that starts the show. People love theme songs, they are catchy, people appreciate songs even more if there’s a twist to them.

The Steps:

Before I delve into how I did this, I wanted to say the application I used to help me with this process was Audacity. It is extremely helpful, and for someone like me who isn’t the most tech-savvy, it proved useful and easy to follow.

One of the first things I did was save an audio file in a folder onto my computer. This enables you to open it up into Audacity then and there. Once I had my audio file I opened it in the Audacity application- it does take a little time for the file to be fully uploaded.

Once it was uploaded, on the top bar I choose was “Effects”.

When I scrolled over the effects, a list of effects show up. The one I choose was “Change Tempo”. By choosing to change the tempo, it will not have a significant effect on changing the pitch.

Then, a box showed up this is where I used the slider to drag it all the way to the left.

This is where I faced my problem, I dragged the slider all the way to the right and for a while it sounded like the Chipmunks: Medieval Style. I kept doing this for about a good ten minutes until I made a self-realization “Why not drag it to the left?” and behold- it worked!

When I chose to change the temple and hit “OK”, Audacity applies the changes to the song. This process took a bit of time about 3 minutes.

And this…is my final product.