The assignment was to take your favorite song and use a sound editing program, such as audacity, to make it 800% or so slower so that it may be unrecognizable (which I soon came to realize that whether it is unrecognizable or not it really depends on what song you do)

The process for creating this assignment was anything but simple. At first I had trouble downloading audacity (this is the issue with having a mac, the old free software is not as easy to obtain) because for some reason the computer could not find the file that it was downloaded from. When it finally started to work after I realized that I had to download the plug-in, I had trouble importing the song that I wanted to edit onto the program. After about 10 to 20 minutes of deleting the song and trying to import it over and over again, I came to the conclusion that maybe it was because the file was in the wrong format. That did end up being the problem so I went online and converted the song into an MP3 and, voila, it imported into audacity. Once everything was set and ready to be edited, I realized that I have not used audacity since high school so I went back online to see how exactly I change the speed or tempo of the song to make it slower. The assignment tutorial really helped out and made the process a little bit easier. Once I located the effect and subsequent change tempo button I began playing with the pace of the song. The first song that I chose was “I wish you would” by Taylor Swift. I slowed down the song and converted it thinking that I was finally finished but no. When I replayed it, it sounded horrible. It sounded as if a giant was coming after you and yelling in various grunts. I tried to change the pitch to compensate for the slower tempo, however, it did not work. Needless to say, it was not what I wanted to submit. After that disaster, I chose my next favorite song, which is a piano compilation. I slowed down the tempo and listened to it. I believe that it sounds good even in slow mode. The song is “River Flows in You” by Yiruma.

So for another three stars I decided to do the “make it slower” assignment. I had a lot of fun with this assignment and ultimately was really satisfied with the end result. The example given on the noir site by artist Nick Pittsinger was really amazing. I honestly never thought Justin Beiber could be enjoyable no matter what someone did to it.

I started off taking random songs I thought might sound cool slowed down and putting them into FL studio. After experimenting with a variety of songs I settled on the song Goddess by Chrome Sparks. The song to begin with is very beautiful and ethereal so I thought it would work well. In the end, the slowed down version of the song worked out really well and sounds like its own independent song

One of our assignments this week, from the bank, was titled “Make it 800% slower.” (Very original title) The instructions were to, “Find a song to experiment with and slow it down to the point where it becomes an amazing piece of ambient music. Be sure to pitch shift so that even though the track is longer, it doesn’t become just a low pitched version.”

One of my all time favorite songs is Home, by Phillip Phillips.

Here it is slowed down:

[Worth 3 stars]

In case you missed it up top, here is the original version:

I used Audacity to slow the song down. After fiddling around a while and becoming extremely frustrated with the pitch and such, I decided to look at some examples online. I did this in hopes that someone posted a tutorial of how to work the god forsaken technology that is Audacity. Thankfully I found this kid’s blog, and he pretty much laid out how to do the assignment. 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. After paulstretching it 50% the song lengthened to about 4 hours. I only used 10 minutes of it for the sake of my sanity. I was not about to sit here for three days waiting for it to upload…no thank you.

In the end, the final project came out sounding like dying whales, but hey, at least I tried? Right? Please don’t fail me.

For this audio assignment I did “Make it 800% slower” for 3 stars. The song used in the example was U Smile by Justin Bieber and it was done so beautifully. I can not make any promises that mine was done anywhere near as nicely as that. I did the song The Scientist by Coldplay because it is one of my favorite songs and it was already kind of slow so it wouldn’t be that much harder to make it slower… so I thought.

I imported the song onto Audacity and then went to Edit then clicked Select and then hit All and then went to Effects and clicked Change Speed. Once that menu popped up it had a bar at the bottom and it started at the center and I dragged it to the left and did it about 5 or 6 times until it was really slow and basically all the way to the left of the bar and then I had to change the Pitch so it no longer sounded like a very spooky man singing a song at a horribly slow pace. I had to do the same thing as listed above until I got back to the Effects menu and instead of hitting Change Speed I hit Change Pitch. This was very hard to master because I either went way to high and he sounded like a screaming chipmunk or it was not far enough, but I think I got close enough to make it sound normal for the speed of the song.

I hope you enjoyed my slooooooow moooooootion version of this song!

Another Audio Assignment i chose to do this week was Make it 800% slower (3 stars). I chose this because I wanted to see if a song that I slowed down would sound as good as the one that music producer Nick Pittsinger slowed down, U smile.

When I first started this assignment I was trying to use the song “Crazy Rap,” but I was having trouble getting it to sound the way that I wanted it to. So, instead, I switched to Right Now Na Na Na by Akon. I chose this song because I thought it would sound better when slowed down.

In order to make this song sound the way it does now, I imported it to Audacity. Then from there I went to the Edit  menu and clicked Select –>All. Next I clicked Effect–> Change Speed. I used the menu that popped up to slow the speed down by dragging the toggle to the left. After that edit took place, I did almost the same thing, except I clicked Change Pitch, instead of Change Speed, and I dragged that toggle to the right.

I did not slow down this song as much as Pittsinger slowed down U Smile,  but it sounds somewhat ambient. I’m not sure how Pittsinger had the patience, or the time to slow down that song, but I am going to go ahead and assume he had better audio editing software because Audacity was taking forever to change anything, and it even took over 10 minutes to save this. (Furthermore after that, it took what might have been forever to load to soundcloud). I slowed my song down by about 100% and increased the pitch to make it sound more normal and less dark and creepy. I also cut out a lot of the song in order to get it to fit onto soundcloud and also in a wordpress post. The first few times it was too large, so I had to cut it pretty short. So what you will be hearing is a slowed down section of the song from the beginning!

One of the assignments that I chose was to do a slow motion version of a song. I picked the song by User called climax. I thought this was appropriate because of the already drug out lyrics. I used audacity to slow the song way down turning it into a 6 minute song. I then had to change the pitch because the words were hard to hear. It is now a high pitched slow version of Usher. This assignments was extremely entertaining and to be honest this song should be on the radio. The original assignment can be found here. This assignment is worth 3 stars.

This is the make it 800% slower assignment worth 3 points.

This was an interesting experience. I had no clue just how long the process would take for a lengthy piece, or how massive the resulting file would be. It took about 2 hours to process, and I ended up with a 4 GB behemoth of an audio file that was entirely unmanageable, so I snipped only the first 45 minutes or so of the SIX HOUR long piece. The real shame is that some of the most beautiful sounds came later in the piece, but the overall feel is still clear from this clip. I used Bernard Herman’s “Taxi Driver” theme as my music of choice, and the result is mostly dreamy, somewhat haunting gold. It’s amazing how beautiful music comes out in 800x. The sax that comes in and out of Herman’s score is the biggest issue here, as it is sometimes unbearably blaring, obnoxious, and overall difficult to listen to for very long. Otherwise though, there’s a whole wealth of moodiness going on here. This makes we want to experiment with everything now.

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

(Three Stars)

This is “Girl Inform Me” by the Shins, it is Scott Brinkmann’s favorite song. It might be a little hard to recognize because it is slowed down 800%. To do this I took a song off of my iTunes and put it into Audacity. I then used the effect Paulstretch to slow it down. This effect allows you to change the pitch along with the speed. After it has been slowed down it sounds like it takes forever just to change sounds in the song.

I noticed a lot of people completed this assignment a few weeks ago during audio week, and I thought it looked like a lot of fun. Luckily, this also meant that I had some helpful guides that showed me how to best complete the project (shoutout to Christine and Mariah for the super helpful and comprehensive posts about their own experience with this assignment).

So.. can you guess what the song is?

In case you couldn’t tell, it’s “Drunk in Love” by Beyonce feat. Jay Z. I really liked the results of this song because, while it’s obviously distorted, portions of the song still seem recognizable. I think it must be the incredibly distinctive intro and beat that make the song obvious despite being so slowed down and drawn out.

The assignment was not too difficult to complete in Audacity, but it took some time to get the sound I really wanted. The “change tempo” effect made it too extreme and high-pitched for some reason, and the “change pitch” effect didn’t help so much in amending that problem. I decided to start over and used the “paulstretch” effect. This lengthened the song without effecting the pitch quality.

The most troublesome part of this was putting my computer through the strenuous activity of downloading and uploading this huge file. As you can see, the finished product was nearly two hours, and it took a long time to both export the audio from Audacity and upload it to soundcloud. However, I luckily didn’t run into any hiccups during the process (i.e. I didn’t have to stop and restart at all).

Make It 800% Slower: 3 points

So this was my last assignment for this week. I thought this one would be easy  to perform but for some reason it tool me a while complete due to the fact Audacity didnt want to work with me for tonight. The song I chose for this assignment was UFO by Vigiland. This is a very fast up beat song and i thought it would be interesting to slow it down.