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Stars: 3.5
This was a random and fun assignment. I found 5 random words of things that randomly came to mind, put some goofy free music from freesound.org and mashed it together. The hardest part was finding music that kinda fit the theme. I like this random assignment and would do it 10 more times!
In this blog I’m going to be telling you about my time completing the Music Mashup assignment. I found this assignment looking through the Audio Assignments bank on the ds106 website.
When I was looking through the different audio assignments the ‘Music Mashup’ caught my eye quite well due to having an interest in music. You would have thought in the audio assignment bank their would be a lot of great music assignments but a lot of the assignments were to do with sound effects or stripping down songs. The music ‘mashup’ assignment is perfect for me as I enjoy many genres of music. The main assignment requirement was to “create an audio mashup with 2 very distinct songs“. This is another task I really like because there are so many ways of making your own ‘mashup’ unique and creative. Everybody has different taste in music so when combining 2 songs together there are that many songs that nobody will choose the same 2 songs, which helps showcase everybody’s own creativeness.
When I looked into ways of mashing 2 different songs together there are many methods of doing this. The most common song ‘mashup’ is to combine two songs together and remove the instrumental from one song and remove the lyrics from the other, then to combine them. Another way to do it is to merge both songs together then set the lyrics to play in separate bursts or just swap choruses. I decided to take my own approach after listening to another d1so6 user’s example it is very hard to ‘mashup’ two songs and make it sound like they fit together and don’t clash.
So the way I decided to make a ‘mashup’ that actually sounds good was by going onto YouTube and finding an instrumental. Fortunately I already had a great instrumental in mind. The instrumental I chose is a piece of music by The Red Hot Chili Peppers called Pretty Little Ditty. The next step I took was to find a song with lyrics that would fit great over Pretty Little Ditty. As Pretty Little Ditty is such a fast paced instrumental it caused me some trouble finding a song that would keep up with it. As rap is generally fast paced lyrics is was a no-brainer to find a rap song. After looking through many rap songs I found it was best to get a rap acapella. The rap I finally found is called Fast Life by an American rapper called Kool G Rap. I knew these songs would work together as I was playing them both at the same time on YouTube to get an understanding.
Once I knew I was going to use both of these songs I found on YouTube I needed to download them.
The way I downloaded them to my documents was by using a website called convert2mp3.net to allow me to take the audio from the YouTube video without the video, as well as having my own copy. The way you use this website is by copy and pasting the link of the video you want to download into convert bar, then just press convert as seen above. After choosing what format you want to convert it to (I chose mp3) just press download and then save it in your documents.
Once I had both the songs saved as mp3’s in my documents it was time for the editing process. I decided to edit on Adobe Audition although the brief recommended Audacity they are both very similar and offer the same services.
The image above shows what it looks like when importing a single audio file into Adobe Audition. The file imported on the image is the rap acapella, as you can see in the image there is a white part in the audio, which is highlighted. This is because I am about to delete it as there is a blank pause in the audio, you can tell this because there is no waveforms in the highlighted part.
Above is a before and after shot of the rap acapella audio being set to -3db. The image on the right shows the waveforms to be smaller this is because it means the audio has been set not to peak above a certain volume so its not too loud and more equal. This process was done for the rap acapella file and the instrumental audio file.
In the centre of screenshot above shows you that I have set the instrumental audio to -10.5, The reason I lowered the volume is because I wanted the lyrics to be the main part of the song and have the instrumental to be a nice sound-bed underneath to compliment the pace and lyrics.
This screenshot shows the final editing process after trimming down and equalising both the audio files. The upper more illuminated layer is the instrumental, and you can see it is placed to the right slightly. This is because I want the rap acapella to start first then have the instrumental to kick in a few seconds after, as you will be able to hear in the audio player. The instrumental also carries on for a few seconds to ensure the song fades out and doesn’t stop abruptly.
Here you can play my music ‘mashup’ in the embedded SoundCloud player. You can also listen to this song on here on SoundCloud’s website.
Overall I’m extremely pleased with my final product, it is very different from other peoples examples. It also shows what types of music I enjoy. The process for creating the song required a lot of research and listening to different songs and finding out which songs click with each other. The editing stage was fun as I was able to combine both tracks together in the way that I liked. I would recommend this assignment to any users looking through the audio assignment bank.
For this assignment, I found a maze creation software on Discovery Education that allowed you to choose certain aspects that would create a unique maze. I made mine an “escape” maze with random paths and titled it “Rat In A Cage” after one of my favorite Smashing Pumpkins’s songs. I think it’s fairly difficult, but I really like mazes so it was fun for me to solve.
Todays blog is focused entirely on how I completed the Consumer Mashup assignment. This particular assignment is found within the Mashup Assignment section on the ds106 website.
Whilst I was cycling through the different Mashup Assignments using the random assignment shortcut, I found this task caught my attention the most. Looking into the assignment brief, the task was to “Think of anyplace you spend money, and what you most often buy at that place. Then redesign their logo to incorporate your favorite product“. This assignment seems very different, I like how it is made personal to everybody because you have to think what product do I buy the most, where is it I’m buying this product and how can I incorporate this product with the logo of the place I’m buying it at. Most peoples results are going to look very different as we all buy different things from different places and mainly have different creative outputs to design digital media. Here is an example I looked at to further help to grasp the concept of the task, as you can see by the example the logo created was obviously personal to the creator.
I started the process by having a brainstorm of what type of things I buy the most and where I shop the most. Different things sprung to mind, my first thought I was of clothing as I often buy cheap t-shirts from River Island. The only other idea that works as I don’t buy too many things would be to choose something food related as like most people I shop at supermarkets. I decided to go with the supermarket idea so the item I buy the most is Pepsi and the place I buy from the most is Lidl.
To get an idea of how I would incorporate Pepsi and Lidl logo together I looked at a few more examples of what other people did for this assignment. Here is the example to somebody else’s assignment.
This logo helped me out to get an idea on how to merge the two things into one. If you check out this persons example you’ll find the person (Amber Lynn) has merged the cat food brand Whiskas together with American supermarket Target. The logo she created is a great basis to go off of. I personally think it is a very simple, quickly done creation. I plan to use this method of combining logos, though I plan on using Photoshop to add more precision and detail into my logo.
Now i’m going through the process I went through on Photoshop in order to create my logo. The first step I went through to create my logo was importing both Pepsi and Lidl logos into Photoshop to make them ideal to be merged together.
The first step I took after importing the Lidl logo was to remove the text so I can have a nice template to work with. The way I removed the text was by simply using the paint brush tool to paint over the text with the same colour of yellow which effectively removed the text.
The way I made the Pepsi logo ready to be merged was done by changing the original red and blue to match the shade of red and blue used in the Lidl logo, this was done quite easy using the colour sample tool to get the exact shade. I then removed the white background behind the Pepsi logo so it wouldn’t cover any of the Lidl logo. To finish the Pepsi logo off I added the red ring around the edge of the Pepsi symbol enabling it to fit in flush with the Lidl logo.
The image above is what was created after both the edited logos were merged together. This was done by placing the edited Pepsi symbol on top of edited Lidl logo. At first glance you cant really tell its a mix between Pepsi and Lidl so the final step to do was to add the text on top of this image.
Above is the finished product, once I added the text to it, it really has come to life. All I had to do was type out the text find a fitting font and single out the ‘E’ which I made red and tilted over just like the red ‘I’ on the Lidl logo.
I don’t really know why this caught my attention, I guess it’s because I seen this as a creative challenge I wanted to tackle. This was a really fun task I enjoy assignments where I’m allowed to let loose a bit and come up with my very own creation or take on things. This is a great task for everybody as most peoples outcomes should be very different.
Inside of me & Someone like you
This mashup was definitely an unexpected one since Yiruma’s and Adele’s musics are very different from each other. A couple of instrumental musics that I knew came to mind initially, but concerning that classical music was way too “classic,” it did not fit with Adele’s contemporary style of music and I decided not to mash them up together. I sorted through Yiruma’s playlist, which included a couple of contemporary instrumental music and upon trial-and-error, I found the perfect one. Having Yiruma’s “Inside of me” play along Adele’s “Someone like you,” I felt different emotions coming about as oppose to those that were triggered from listening to them respectively. It would be awesome to see more artists’ collaborations that embody different genres of music.
For the Audio assignment, I decided to do a mash-up of an original song and a cover of that song. The assignment was called Mixing Songs like batter and was rated 4 1/2 stars. I think It deserves a 5 because it was pretty fricken hard!
I attempted to take Eleanor Rigby performed by the Beatles and Eleanor Rigby performed by The Fray and layer them on top of each other so that the artists were singing at the same time. This was a lot harder than expected because I don’t have a lot of experience working with audacity so I had to google some things. I changed the tempo a little bit of The Fray version cause it was a lot slower than the Beatles and cut out some of the beginning from the Beatles version. Overall I think it turned out OK, but I still definitely to work on my audacity skills.
This assignment was 3 stars and rounds out my 12 stars worth of assignments. For this assignment you create your own 30 second ringtone. I mashed two different guitar solos to create this. I edited them a little and I think it came together very well:
This assignment took a really long time for me to complete, mostly because I could not find clips with singers singing the same versions of the song. I did not anticipate such time consumption because I started with a thought, “It’ll be easy; I will find two versions of the same song and combine them using a mashup program.” Little did I realize that every singers are individuals with different voices, or rather emotions. The emotions that they put into the song resulted in different variations of the song. I loved hearing everyone’s versions of the song because they illustrated their own uniqueness very well. The process of changing songs as well as changing the start times was painstaking, however, I am very satisfied with the result and also came to a conclusion that we are all unique in our own little ways.
So for my story using ONLY sound, I decided to do what my Friday’s usually sound like. I got all of the sounds from freesounds.org and mashed together what a typical Friday sounds like to me. Hope you enjoy!
I decided to do the Music Mash Assignment that was to take two or more songs that are similar and mash them together into a conversation. I decided to do a conversation between Adele and Taylor Swift. So a little bit of background into this conversation is that adele is pretty obsessive and really wants to get back together with Taylor, but Taylor is not having it!
I used audacity for this and it was a little bit difficult but I think I cheated and used my phone for the audio and recorded it in #oops. I did have a lot of fun though, and I think it turned out pretty good!
It was rated 4 stars.
