For this 4.5 star assignment, where I had to take a speech and a song an put them together, I chose to take Dwight D. Eisenhower’s D-Day speech from 1944 and match it up with a song from the band Two Steps from Hell. I felt that the speech and state of the world at the time were fitting for each other. More so, the song’s title, “Protector of The Earth” would prove true by the end of the war.
World War 2 has always been one of my favorite war’s to study and learn about. The bravery and courage of all those that found themselves on the battlefield during the war is still something that I take to heart anytime it comes up. To that effect I felt that the speech given by Eisenhower matched well with the band and song for this. The orchestral movement of the song seems to add a sense of gravity to his words that, despite them being heavy and meaningful before, changes the speech.
To create this combination of speech and song I first went to youtube.com to find the speech and song that I felt fit with each other. I had first thought about one of Churchill’s speeches but none of them felt right to me. I knew I wanted to mix the speech with a song from Two steps from Hell but wasn’t sure which one. I eventually chose the one I did for it’s title and how it seemed to match up well with the speech, changing tone at the right times. I took both these Youtube videos over to a youtube to mp3 site and got to work editing.
Matched up the tone changes in the music to where I wanted them to be. Then, I trimmed the music audio to match the speeches length. Next, selected the last few seconds of it and faded it out. Finally I exported it as an mp3 and uploaded it to soundcloud.
I think every woman I know has fallen victim to gender inequality, whether that be a cat-call, unequal pay or respect in the work place, or much worse. It is time that everyone comes together to better our world for women and for us all. There is literally no downside when women are equal to men. Now for some personal anecdotes that may allow others who have not experienced these inequalities to see it through my eyes.
Once I was walking through town with my friends on summer vacation. We were on a road trip after we had just graduated high school. While we were crossing the street (it was evening but still light out and there were plenty of other pedestrians) we passed by a U-Haul moving van with two men inside. Their windows were open and as we passed by the driver said to us “Hey, wanna get in the back?” What a disgusting and inappropriate comment to say to anyone, let alone 17 and 18 year old girls. My mom’s boss told her she was overreacting because she used an exclamation point in an urgent email. I have listened to my male friends make jokes about and judge women’s bodies, and then was told to “not be so sensitive” when I told them to stop. I asked my boyfriend the other day if he was ever taught to hold his car keys in his fist, pointing out through his fingers so if anyone were to try and harm him he would be able to defend himself. He looked at me very confused and said no. Of course he wouldn’t have been taught that. Boys aren’t taught things like that. But it was one of the first things I was taught when I got my license.
I chose this 4.5 star assignment because it was similar to the last assignment I had done and I wanted to further my practice with editing audio together. I was hoping that my mistakes in the previous assignment would lend me some guidance in attempting this one. I was Googling around for short speeches, and nothing was really resonating with me. Then I stumbled across Emma Watson’s UN speech. I had seen it when it first came out and while watching it I was quickly reminded how important her speech is for everyone to hear. I knew I would choose this speech, as feminism is something I loudly and proudly support.
Next I had to choose a song. I didn’t want to choose a song without lyrics, because that would 1) make the assignment too easy, and 2) not give as much depth and meaning to the final product. I chose Imagine by John Lennon because it is a slow song with a really similar message to Watson’s speech. I was originally going to cut out the lyrics as Watson was speaking and only play lyrics in pauses, but I liked how the whole song sounded layered underneath her speech. I think it adds hopefulness to her speech. I chose Imagine because to me it has the same message as Watson’s speech: imagine the world as a better place, where everyone lives in harmony and equality.
To create this in Garageband, I first downloaded the songs using a youtube to mp3 site . Just copy and paste the URL of the Youtube video into the website, click start then download.  I save the mp3 files to my desktop so they’re easier to import into Garageband later.
Next, open Garageband and choose voice. (I use voice for everything, it is the least cluttered interface and gets the job done)
Click and drag the two audio files from the desktop into Garageband. Then trim the audio to where you want the speech and song to begin and end. To do this, select the file you want to cut by clicking on it. Move the vertical white line to the spot you want to cut, then click edit > split regions at playhead. This will split the audio box that is selected at the line. You can then select the parts of the file you don’t want and just hit delete on the keyboard.
Now we have to adjust the volume. I wanted the background music to be quieter than the speech. To do this click show/hide animation, which are the two connected dots highlighted blue in the picture below.
Once show/hide animation is selected, when you click on a track a yellow line will appear. This represents the level of volume.
Click and drag the line to move it up or down. To fade out the end of the song, scroll over to where the track ends. Then click a few seconds before and right where the track ends (basically where you want the start and end of the fade to be). This will create two little yellow dots. Click and drag the last dot all the way down. This diagonal line represents the volume gradually being turned down.
Then, save by going to file > save as and upload the song to Soundcloud by going to share > song to Soundcloud.
To export the .band file to an mp3, go to share > export song to disk and choose the mp3 option.
For the Remix a Song With Some Speech assignment, I chose a speech made by Senator Ron Paul in 2011 set to free use music by Jon Watts (found at the Free Music Archive). This is one of my favorite speeches ever made. Of course, it’s a controversial speech, and you may not agree with it, but I felt like it was still a powerful speech when it was made and still remains powerful today. I edited the music a bit – the original clip was only 20 seconds or so – splicing it so it repeated on tempo and turned up the volume a little as the speech went on. It’s a fairly lengthy speech (about 3:30), but it’s worth a listen.
*This assignment immediately caught my eye. I decided to mash up my favorite song (at the moment) and then the most impressive speech. So I chose MLK, I have a dream speech. I had to listen to both recordings a couple times to make sure the mashing up went together. Surprisingly enough I really liked how it turned out. I’m still figuring out how soundcloud works and which sounds they pick up on. But over all I really enjoyed this assignment and would rate it 5, because it was a bit tough to link two audios together and make sure it flowed well.
For this assignment we were required to take a song and some speech and remix them. It is supposed to be meaningful and convey a message. I picked the song “When I Was Your Man”, by Bruno Mars. However this version is a violin cover that touches deep within the soul.
Since I am currently in a government class, I chose to use a televised campaign address from one of our beloved presidents,  Ronald Reagan. I picked this speech for a couple of reasons. One, it moved well with the song I chose and I feel that the violin just made his speech even deeper and more meaningful. Second, He used to our man….. the President of the United States.
To create this assignment I downloaded both the videos through YouTube converter to make them into mp3s, which automatically synced them to my iTunes. Then I transferred them into Audacity
I then trimmed the mp3s and layered the files. Once I was happy with my creation I save it to my desktop and from there uploaded to Soundcloud.
Trying to create this was a nightmare. Did you know there is absolutely no place to go that has WiFi at UMW? Everyone is either super loud or you’re not “alloud” to make noise (see what I did there :)). I cannot wait until I get moved into a quiet, little apartment so I can actually have some peace and quiet. #countdowntothewedding.
Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 is probably one of my favorite speeches. I have a few quotes from this speech saved on my computer and whenever I read them, I am put in a better mood and feel more determined to make my dreams reality. I heard the remix of “I Lived” by One Republic during my winter break and put it on repeat for a while. When I was looking for a song to add with this speech, that was the first song I thought of. In the lyrics, the song encourages each and every one of us to go out and fully live our lives since we don’t know when it will be our last day. The same goes for Jobs’ speech, which is why they work well together. I tried to have certain parts of the speech coincide with certain lyrics of the songs. For example, Job’s says “you’ve got to find what you love” with the lyrics “I hope that you fall in love.” Some of these were coincidental and when they spoke back to each other, it was honestly magical for me.
Inspired by the WaffleStomper, I thought I’d try remixing a song and some speech. Keeping with The Wire theme, I was also inspired by the speech that Major Colvin gave about the history of the paper bag. I decided to mix that with Blake Leyh’s closing theme, The Fall (YT). I used MPEG Streamclip to get the audio for both. When I put them together in Audacity, I saw that the speech was about twice as long as the music:
So I had to do some editing. I went at it on both fronts – shortening the speech and lengthening the music. If you look at the speech, you see a lot of flatline segments, the pauses between his words. Taking them out entirely would make it sound unnatural, but they can be edited aggressively. Every place I saw a length of silence, represented by the flat line in the waveform, I removed a large part of it.
This shortened the speech significantly, but it was still longer than the music. Editing that was trickier. I selected three passages and looped them by copying and pasting. The trick was to listen to the pattern in the music and figure out where it repeats. That way I could duplicate the sections without disturbing the flow of the music. I don’t think I did a really good job with getting the splices right – if you focus on the music you can hear where I edited it. On the positive side, it’s only jarring in a couple spots. I used the Amplify function to boost the voice and the mixer slider to bring down the volume of the music.
Betsey Johnson once said, “With over 3 million women battling breast cancer today, everywhere you turn there is a mother, daughter, sister, or friend who has been affected by breast cancer.” My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. I want to dedicate this to my mom. I still remember that during my junior year, she told me she was diagnosed with breast cancer at stage level 2B. I was like:
I was thankful to God that it was an early stage and it wasn’t serious. Stage level 3 is the serious one but hey at least my mom survived it and is a breast cancer survivor. She fought through breast cancer, had her surgery, and did her chemotherapy during the whole summer when I was a junior in high school. I couldn’t ask for a better mom because she had many surgeries even when I was a little kid and she fought through them but this breast cancer was the toughest once with the chemotherapy. She’s still fighting through the chemotherapy affects which part of it her bones are weak. I always joke around my mom and she laughs about it, to cheer her up I’m like:
When I found an audio assignment to do today, I was thinking to do this assignment to relate it to breast cancer. Since it is breast cancer awareness month this month, I think it’s a good opportunity to do this and have a bit fun with it by showing the meaning of this song with youtube video clips I found to remix it with the song Kelly Clarkson Stronger. So all I did was get the clips and convert them into an mp3 audio clip. I went to Audacity and imported all of them and then split the important clips that I thought was important and put the clips on one track and put the song on another track. I normalized it as well by putting it -3.5 dB. Here is my audio clip on SoundCloud and here if in case SoundCloud flags as a copyright again:
I’ve been trying to take care of my mom and I always pray she’s getting better everyday while I’m at UMW trying my best to get all A’s for her. Hope you guys enjoyed this assignment! Love you ma (mom)!
This is my rendition of the audio assignment “Remix A Song With Some Speech”. I love old westerns, particularly the ones that Elmer Bernstein scored, so I knew I’d use one of my favorites which is the theme he wrote for “The Magnificent Seven”. Â It’s a rousing, heroic piece so I needed an inspiring speech […]
