This assignment was a lot of fun. It was cool to see how easy it is to distort voices.

For this assignment I manipulated a speech from the democratic party in 1919. I added crowds cheering, changed the pitch and added a duplicate clip that reversed the pitch on top. I used audacity to create this, and I downloaded the clip from Wikipedia.

For 3 Stars: The idea of this assignment is to take a speech, it can be political or not, and distort the audio making the speech giver say horrible, strange or funny things. A great software to use for this assignment would be Logic Pro which enables you to cut, chop and distort audio. A great example of this can be found on my website in which I took a speech given by President Donald Trump and cut and spliced it to make it seem odd and strange. This assignment should be fun and should create many unique and creative audio pieces. Staying within the boundaries of our theme; legend, myth and folklore, an idea for this assignment would be taking audio recordings of stories that involve these themes and distorting them in the same way as mentioned previously.

For my third audio assignment this week I decided to do another 3 star assignment called speech and audio distortion. This assignment asked that…

The idea of this assignment is to take a speech, it can be political or not, and distort the audio making the speech giver say horrible, strange or funny things. A great software to use for this assignment would be Logic Pro which enables you to cut, chop and distort audio.

This assignment excited me because in the music technology class I took last semester my professor showed us how to distort speech or audio using audacity. I felt this assignment would be a good way of practicing that. Disclaimer I am not a professional and have no much to learn. Similarly I’m sure I’ve made many mistakes in making this.

That being said I decided to take the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton and distort it in some way. Political views aside I created a clip of Donald Trump saying things he actually didn’t say within his portion of the debate. It is all appropriate and nothing aggressive in any way. I just wanted to create something to give people a laugh.A

When creating this assignment I used audacity. I downloaded a full version the presidential debate in a .wav form. From there I imported it into audacity and began to cut and paste different clips together. This wasn’t as hard as I thought due to my previous experiences with audacity. Once I created the speech the way I wanted it I decided to save it as a .mp3 and then uploaded it to Soundcloud. Likewise I decided to make the background of my audio clip a silly cartoon of Trump. I know this week is about audio storytelling however I felt this image did a decent job of contributing to the story.

Ultimately I wanted to tell a funny story of politics. I used Trump but could’ve easily used Hilary or any other president if I wanted. Regardless of who it was I wanted to create a funny story of fabricated politics. I feel like politics is such a serious thing and many times we feel uncomfortable talking about it or getting involved. That being said I wanted to make this lighthearted and take away the heaviness surrounding it. Similar to the ds106 radio, what I created tells a story. It’s audio that paints an image in someone’s head similar to the dramas told on the radio show. I liked how I had the ability to create something that initially was so serious and now is viewed as a comical story. At least I think so…

I chose to do the assignment of speech and story audio for three stars. I definitly had a much better time with this one now that I know how in the heck to use Logic, but I am still not an expert by any chance. I found a speech of JFK talking about space exploration, but the audio that I made out of it is nothing like that. I think it’s funny how I made it sound like he’s saying only 5 years ago we, as in Americans, learned to write and push a cart with wheels.

Again I used the Logic application on the HCC computers. I found the audio on freesound.org. There weren’t too many speeches, so I’m interested in seeing if anyone else did this same speech and how it turned out.

So, in the very end of this assignment, I clipped all the extra silence from the end of the audio on quicktime with the help of my new Logic buddy, but when I tried to upload that media onto soundcloud it wouldn’t let me. So my audio clip is only a little over a minute long, but it says 14 minutes.