I decided to do the Favorite Song audio assignment in which you have to take the lyrics out of a song for thirty seconds and see if everyone can guess which song it is. The song I chose already has a fair amount of instrumental within the song (there is a hint for you) so I chose a thirty second part of the song where the lyrics are supposed to be there. The very end of the song will also probably give it away too, so you’re welcome. I edited and trimmed everything in Audacity. I decided not put this on soundcloud just in case for some crazy reason they took it down for copyright infringement.

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/favorite-song/

For this Audio Assignment I was suppose to pick my favorite song and play it for at least 30 seconds and see who could guess the name of it! So here is my song :

I chose this song because when I was little it was the main song in one of my favorite movies. I grew up listening to it a lot after that, I would have this song on repeat and would play this song until no one around me could no longer listen to it anymore! It is still possibly one of my favorite songs if not still my all time favorite song. I hope you guys can figure out what it is because it is a great song !

ENJOY

Favorite Song (1 1/2 Stars)

Take your favorite song. Remove the lyrics. Play only up to thirty seconds of the song. Listener must be able to guess.

Story Behind the Story

Phew, let me tell you, while this may have been 1 1/2 stars, the process I took to get to this stage was excruciating. Let me back track.

I originally wanted to do the assignment where you slow a song down to 800%. It was going to be the very first audio assignment that I completed. I figured it wasn’t going to be super easy but I had confidence that I knew how to at least slow down a song. Wrong. This was just the beginning of my frustrations. First of all, audacity and I have had a constant battle this week and it is hard to say who is in the lead. Did you know that it is impossible to slow a song down to 800% on Audacity? Well guess what, IT IS. So after two trips to the DKC and and injured mouse pad, I finally gave up. I wanted so badly to figure out a way, but it just wasn’t going to happen. Maybe one day I will have the courage to go to war, but this battle was a shut out.

I still wanted to do something with music. Mash-ups and remixes have always been an interests of mine (but I could never in a million years make one), so this was my tiny step into the world of audio editing. Now since I HAD no idea what I was doing, I once again went to the DKC (I should just become a promotional ad for your center because I feel like I have been in there at least 10 times). I found out it really wasn’t as hard as I had expected. The tutor walked me through the steps and then we spent some time playing around to get it at a good point.

This assignment really brought in the idea of background sound being the influential piece of music. As I learned when reading Hanson’s piece, sound makes the purpose of the song important. This isn’t a perfect example, apparently some songs have so many layers that newbies like me just can’t get rid of all of them. At first I was extremely frustrated by some of the background noise. My tutor and I even had Dr. Burtis listen to it to make sure that it qualified the assignment. Even though she said yes, I still came home and tried my hardest to find a way to get rid of it. There was one point when my roommate asked “well why don’t you just use the instrumental version on youtube?” Two thoughts ran through my head, first, why did I not know that there was an instrumental version, and second, it wouldn’t be as satisfying knowing I hadn’t done it myself.

“There are no finished products, only due dates.”

Work Itself

Narrate the Process

In case you missed it, I had to do a throwback. I mean who didn’t like the Backstreet Boys? This was a confusing process and by the end it was a lot of clicking random buttons and moving dials to get it right where I wanted it. I dragged the song from my iTunes account (I’m not ashamed to say this) and put it in audacity. I cut it to 30 seconds and that is about how far I got before the DKC tutor stepped in. He was a lifesaver! We googled the process and went through the steps.

I have realized while there are certain steps to be taken in sound editing, a lot of it stems off of messing around with the functions. By the end, I couldn’t tell you what buttons were used, I just know that at some point we had done it. While I am confident that I could do it again, it seems that there is no set way to ensure a perfect outcome. The end game develops from what you make of the process, it is a part of you.

The last audio assignment I completed this week was titled, “Favorite Song.” The directions were to, “Take your favorite song. Remove the lyrics. Play only up to thirty seconds of the song. Listener must be able to guess.”

Here is my clip:

[Worth 1 1/2 stars]

If you can’t figure out what this is then you’re automatically a heathen and I can’t be friends with you. Here is the link to the original song.

To complete this project I had to use some very mysterious and totally legal (*cough cough*) resources. I found the instrumental version of my song on youtube, and then used a website, that will remain unnamed, to download the song off youtube and into my itunes. Once the song was in my itunes, I once again used the audacity application to trim the song down to thirty seconds. After I had it trimmed, I exported it to my desktop and uploaded it to my soundcloud account.

I created a one star audio assignment.  This assignment is up to 30 seconds with no words guessing game.   It can not be uploaded into soundcloud because of copyright laws.   Sooooo any guesses?!