I mentioned in my about me page that I like cartoons… and one of the cartoons that I’m crazy about (like a lot of other people right now) is Steven Universe. I can’t help it. I love the songs, the gems, the fusions, and the neverending possibilities for conspiracy theories. One question gets answered and three more pop up, like a mystery hydra. It’s infuriating.

In the latest episodes, we haven’t seen much of the Crystal Gems – the three magical ladies in the intro song. “The tall one, the purple one, the hot one,” according to Mayor Dewey. I’m going to assume they’ve been sick, because that’s the only acceptable reason for not seeing them around at least sometimes. And since Steven’s gotten home, he’s caught whatever cold they have too. Or is it a magical gem disease? Whatever it is, it’s making them sound really weird.

I thought the B-Flat assignment would be a really fun one to do, especially after looking at some of the posts that former students had made. This one in particular cracked me up!! It’s so well done and it had some great pointers on how to get started on my own. It turned out to be tougher than I was expecting.  The video I used for this project was Steven Universe – Intro 2 (“Official” Instrumental and Acapella). This video was a lifesaver. In my first attempt, I had collected two individual videos (one instrumental and one isolated vocals) but when I imported them both into Audacity, the audio never lined up. I think one of the tracks was ever so slightly faster than the other. This video has both an instrumental AND an isolated vocal track in the same location… thank god. The site I used to convert the video to mp3 is onlinevideoconverter.com, and HERE is a link to the LAME plugin, which lets me export as an mp3 with no hassle!!! Below is a gallery of my final (and successful) attempt at B-flatting the Steven Universe theme.

This was fairly easy to do, his voice is already pretty high anyway.  I s=just imported the track to audacity and changed the pitch setting and uploaded to my soundcloud account.  interesting outcome overall!

????½

Second assignment this week is B-Flat. I’m supposed to use Audacity to flatten the vocals of a song by one half-step. The song I decided to flatten is Under Cover of Darkness by the Strokes. Here’s the normal version of the song:

I searched around on YouTube and managed to find this version of the song sans vocals:

It sounds a bit off, but it’s the best I could find. Then, I managed to find this version that mostly suppresses the instruments, giving me a vocals-only version:

Once again, not the best quality, but it’ll have to do. Once I loaded them into Audacity, I noticed they weren’t quite in step with each other, so I had to do some fiddling around to get them to sync correctly. I also went through the vocals only version and silenced some of the areas where you could still hear the instruments and where there were no vocals. Once I got them to sound pretty similar to the normal song, I used Audacity’s Change Pitch function to drop the pitch of the vocals by one halfstep. I got this absolutely disgusting audio here:

(Okay so, I had the SoundCloud file embedded here, but it keeps getting removed due to “””copyright violation”””. I’ll try directly uploading it to my blog instead.)

It sounds so terrible and out-of-tune. I didn’t expect just a halfstep pitch shift could mess it up that much. The slowed-down Human Sadness I made the other day actually sounds pretty good, but this sounds so bad oh my god.

For this audio assignment we had to change the pitch of a song by a half step. I used audacity for this and changed the pitch on Upside Down by Jack Johnson. To do this I went to the effects and clicked change pitch. I changed the steps from -2.02 to -2.52. I chose this song because its one of my favorite songs and its catchy and upbeat so I figured it would be funny to hear it in a deep monotone voice. It makes his voice seem so out of place for this song.

This assignment called for remastering a song so the vocals are half a step out of their original key. I’ll be live blogging this, so it’s time to head to Spotify.

Link to Assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/b-flat/

Stars: 4.5

Process: After again perusing my song repository, I’ve selected Renegades by X Ambassadors. This song is pretty vocals-heavy in addition to being primarily acoustic, so I’m excited to see what playing with its key turns it into. After obtaining the mp3, it’s being moved to Audition. After a quick search on the internet, it appears Renegades is played in the key of A (at 10A to be precise). With a quick trip to Audition’s Effects menu, the vocals have been pitched to A minor. That didn’t change much, so I’ve now tried and stuck with pitching to A#/Bb major.

https://soundcloud.com/user-118904105/renegades-in-a

For this assignment I took Weezer’s classic Buddy Holly and changed the vocals a half step higher. I did this using Audacity’s “change pitch” option. I messed with changing the vocals a half step lower and higher, but I noticed a more notable difference when I took it a half step higher. It makes it sound like a young punk rock band is covering the song, which is pretty goofy. I kept messing with it and took it further, making it 2 half steps (1 full step?) higher. This made it sound more feminine, which was pretty cool. I’ve never heard this song sung in such high pitch, but it sounds pretty good! For some reason Soundcloud wouldn’t let me upload these songs onto my account (perhaps copyright infringement?), so I just uploaded them directly onto this post. The first is the song on half step and the other on two.

B-Flat Assignment

Link to assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/b-flat/

Following this week’s theme of audio, I decided to do something with music. This assignment requires me to take the vocal line of a song, and make it flat. I chose to do one of my favorite songs, Man in the Box by Alice in Chains.

This assignment was relatively easy for me to do, since I have a bit of know-how in this area of digital media. First, I downloaded mp3 versions of the song off of Youtube using flvto.biz (website). One version was just the instrumental, and the other was vocals only. I imported both versions into Audacity on different tracks. Then I lined up the vocal track with the instrumentals. The vocal track wasn’t spaced out appropriately, so I had to edit the placement of the vocals several times throughout the song to make sure the vocals were synced with the instrumentals. The last step is to highlight the vocal track, go to “sliding time scale/ pitch shift” under the “effects” tab. Type -1 into initial pitch shift and final pitch shift. Wah-lah you have a pitch-shifted vocal track.

The second project I did was from the audio category. This project was rated 4 stars, which I would say was fairly accurate. The goal for this project was to flatten or sharpen the audio of a song and upload it to Youtube. After searching online for a while, I finally figured out how to do this. The internet is very helpful when you need to find a “how to.” Overall, I think I successfully flatten the audio of the Y.M.C.A. by the Village People.