For my fourth Assignment for my final project I chose to do an Audio Assignment worth 4 stars, totaling 15 stars. The assignment instructions were to take an existing piece of audio and use audio tools (I used Audacity) to change the sound.  The original audio I used was from a 2012 commercial of toaster strudels.

In 2012 Pillsbury put out a commercial to promote their famed breakfast item, the Toaster Strudel.  The Toaster Strudel was a breakfast item that was made of a glossed a wheat that was sugary as ever, and on top of that had a frosting that you could swizzle on top of the pastry.  The food was delicious, but wasn’t necessarily the best thing for you.  To promote their new and improved item they launched a series of commercials that included the Pillsbury Doughboy.

I created this in Audacity, by firstly opening a new project.

I then used a YouTube to MP3 converter to change the Pillsbury commercial on Youtube from an MP4 to an MP3.

I then used the speed changer tool to fasten the commercial by %50

Star: 4 stars

One of my favorite songs out at this time is Redbone by Childish Gambino.  The song has many distinct characteristics about it, such as the fading in and out of his voice, and the strong instrumentals in the background.  As soon as I saw the description for this assignment I knew that I would have to give it a try.  I found myself having alot of fun with this assignment, but it also wasn’t the easiest to complete. To change up the unique song I added some additional echo effects to give the long pauses more filling. Additionally, I changed the bass and tempo to some parts of the chorus, and long versus.

Link!

• Imported the song into Audaciity

• Added effects to the song, such as echo, fade in, fade out, compressor, and bass and treble.

I had the chance to get my hands on Audacity and as I was getting myself adjusted using such software, I had a lot of fun playing around with it. I chose the song, Shut Up and Dance by Walk The Moon from my “mixtape,” and I added random effects to the song every 15 seconds for 15 seconds. The result was hilarious because I did not think about editing in alignment with the song itself; rather, I simply added an effect every 15 seconds without knowing what each effect did. Most of the effects were labeled in accordance with the effects themselves such as “echo” and “paulstretch.” I noticed that for “paulstretch,” it stretched parts of the song as twice as much and somehow left out all of the lyrics while amplifying only the background music! It created a fascinating music out of the original song and the final product sounded very cool (well some parts). I uploaded the final edited version of the song on SoundCloud.

AudioAssignments, AudioAssignments2028

I have another…message to fellow secret agents….which cannot be accessed through soundcloud because it’s dumb….but regardless, here is another encoded message. It involves adding effects to a song to mask my message. I hope you can receive it well and I await further orders! Agent smith, signing off.

-Agent Smith

Faster. I always need to go faster. Sometimes I see people and I just think they’re moving like snails. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Running, watching, processing, improvising – whatever it is, I like moving quickly. Unfortunately, for my ears, that applies to my music as well. This is “Born a Champion” by David Travis Edwards. Well, this is how I hear it at least:

For some reason, I also see cats all the time. It’s been that way ever since mission 32. Don’t ask. It took painstakingly long to edit this audio file so that I could give you an idea of how I hear sound. First, I had to download Audacity and read some documentation. Then, the Russians chased me for a few hours. Finally, I was able to escape and access my computer remotely through a secret agent thing-a-mabob. I imported my audio file from a flash drive, and then I was able to change the tempo through the effects tab at the top of the screen. When I went to upload the file to SoundCloud, I quickly realized the Russians had used all of my available upload memory. So, I had to improvise. I decided to upload the audio file to YouTube. Since it didn’t have an image attached to it, I couldn’t upload it there either. The Russians are always one step ahead of me.

Finally, I used iMovie to import the audio file along with a picture of my cats, Tipper and Topper. Eureka! I was able to consolidate the media and upload directly to YouTube from iMovie. Even though the process went a lot more slowly than I would have hoped, I learned a lot.

1. Never mess with the Russians.
2. iMovie is amazing. 
3. Audacity has way too many options. 

After all of this, I feel comfortable using some of the basic settings on Audacity. The fact that it’s open-source and has so much customizability is a feat. I hope to get more experience with Audacity in the future, and I’m sure I will.

So my first assignment for the week is:

“Modifying an original song without outside sounds”

This was actually pretty interesting to do.  I’ve always wanted to work with music editing and this assignment gave me the push to actually try without it being too difficult. The song I chose has a bit going on as it is so it was perfect since I would not be adding anything to it but altering what was already provided.

In order to do what I needed for this I downloaded Audacity and did a quick look over for all of the effects. I went to my itunes library and imported that into Audacity and then used the tools to get the sound I wanted.  I didn’t want to alter the sound of the song too much since I’m not exactly familiar with altering and mixing music. Initially attempted an echo effect but didn’t like it so I kept it simple and decided to change the pitch from F#/Gb to D#/Fb and then slowed it down by 5%.  Overall, I’m pleased with this as my first time working with music editing!