My second assignment was to Have a Phone Conversation by Yourself, which was worth 4 stars. In order to do this assignment, I used a very helpful tutorial.

This assignment was fun, but time consuming. It took me at least 5 tries to finally get everything right, and I had a pretty difficult time because this is my first time using Audacity. It is pretty easy once you get used to it though!

Please click here for the assignment page

Assignment Stars: 4

This seemed a challenging task to me as what I needed for my story was a telephone conversation between a male and a female person. I wrote the script that I wanted to implement during the telephone conversation and then followed the following steps in Audacity audio editing software to make it work for my story.

Step 1: I recorded an audio but with breaks. I mean I would record what the male voice has to say and press stop. It would automatically take me to a new sound layer in Audacity. Then I would record what the female voice would say.

Step 2: I downloaded a “Telephone Ring” audio clip from SoundBible and imported it into Audacity and kept it at the beginning of the whole audio.

Step 3: I selected the voice layers for female voice and made changes to their “Pitch” from the “Effect Menu”

Step 4: I changed the “Percent” property of the voice layers that were representing a female voice to 13 as can be seen in the image bellow.

Step 5: I then exported the audio in mp3 format to my computer’s hard drive from the file menu.

Please follow this link for a video tutorial to change the pitch of a sound clip in Audacity.

The post How to record a telephone conversation with two different voices when both voices are your’s appeared first on TaractarOnline.

I think I’ve mentioned it a couple of times now on my blog, but I am waitress at a local dinner. We serve the standard burgers but we also have a couple of specialty burgers. One is named after our owner! So, I have to internally roll my eyes every time a customer reads the menu and says: “I want a burger.” Not very specific. And one thing a waitress hates is when a customer is not specific about what exactly they want. Pro-tip: tell the waitress what you actually want! I’d rather have a customer over-explain than under-explain. Not only does it prevent food coming out completely wrong or consumption of food people are allergic to, it also prevents patrons yelling at me for not having their food cooked to their specifications. And trust me, I’ve been yelled at by customers for pretty much everything. Such is the reality of the food service industry, having to deal with grumpy customers. However, those interactions inspired me to make this phone conversation, which is based on very true events. Trust me.

This assignment was my first foray into Audacity, a program I downloaded from the ds106 page for this week. Though I was intimidated at first, once you start working it’s pretty easy to find your way around. I recorded my audio by clicking the red record button at the top. Then I selected the segments of audio that I wanted to be my “customer”. From there I selected Effects from the top bar and then clicked Change Pitch. I wanted my customer to have a deeper voice, so I dragged the notch to -35 from the bottom toggle.

After that was done, I needed to export my media file into a MP3 file. So I hit Export from the File menu and selected MP3 (make sure you have already downloaded the LAME file specified in the ds106 instructions for Audacity).

I imported my media file into iMovie, where I inserted it into the audio section and selected sound effects from   their content library. I picked “Telephone Ringing 02” and inserted it in the beginning and “Telephone Dial Tone” and inserted it at the end of my clip. Next, I exported my sound file from iMovie onto SoundCloud and published it.

I know I probably sound pretty snarky about my job as a waitress but it’s actually just my sense of humor about it. Having someone ask for “regular” cheese on their hamburger, can actually lighten a long, dull shift and makes for a good story. I like my job because it gives me thicker skin for dealing with difficult people and it made me have an appreciation for the small moments that make me laugh at my job. So, no, I’m not a waitressing snob. I’m probably just a cheese snob.

Assignment Rating:

I completed the ‘have a phone conversation with yourself’ assignment. I chose this assignment so my character could be shown in my work this week. The premise is that he goes into a bar and orders a drink.

I wrote a short little interaction between the bartender and my character. Using audacity I recorded and edited the pitch of my voice to obtain a deeper pitch.

This assignment was pretty easy. Playing around with the pitch was tricky though. I have no idea what the numbers and letters represented, so I just assumed they were there to represent a the notes on an instrument. I kind of played off of this information to obtain a deeper pitch.

This little conversation was inspired by an assignment that had you record a conversation with yourself. I chose to do a sort of grandmother-in-law and granddaughter-in-law phonecall based around a scene reminiscent of the Old West and old world views. In this phonecall the two women argue about Madeline’s role as a woman and their summer plans.

This project was a cool way to get into characters and battle it out in a conversation I’m sure too many women were having at the time. I wrote the script myself and recorded the dialogue in Audacity. Afterward, I added in the phone sounds and some page-turning noises (although they didn’t get through very well in the finished project). The hardest part was certainly pretending to be two different people and maintaining accents and pitch. I did each person all in one go and then spliced it together into dialogue (so I could have the two characters talking over each other), but I had to do quite a few takes of the lines anyway. It certainly doesn’t sound professional, but I’m proud of it otherwise.