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Assignment number two. I’m doing a slightly modified version of the Contest Nobody Could Win assignment. I’m supposed to take less than one second from six random songs and put them together, while you guys are supposed to guess. I looked through my music for a while before realising that I didn’t really want to do exactly what the assignment said. Six random songs didn’t sound too interesting, to be entirely honest. So instead of random songs, I chose twelve songs, all from the same movie’s soundtrack! I opened all the songs in Audacity and played around with them to find good portions to cut out and use. Once I got the little music bits, I put them all together, in order. I considered putting them out of order, but I didn’t want to make it more difficult to guess than it needed to be. If you’ve seen the movie, then I think this shouldn’t be too hard!

And the answer, once again ROT13’d:

Jngpuzra

For this assignment you had to take fragments of a song (under one second) and put them together. Then people try to guess what all the songs are. (If you don’t know all the songs there’s a list below).

Hopefully this video stays up since I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to post audio.

The assignment said to use six songs, but I ended up using nine. I took short fragments of the nine different songs and combined them.

The songs I used are:

• Everywhere I Go by Hollywood Undead
• GDFR by Flo Rida
• Cinema by Benny Benassi (Skrillex Remix)
• Sugar Boats by Modest Mouse
• Run by AWOLNATION
• Jungle by X Ambassadors
• Disturbia by Rihanna
• Caribou Lou by Tech N9ne
• Uptown funk by Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars

In this assignment, The Contest That Nobody Could Win, we were meant to “Take six very short fragments (less than one second each) from six different songs and ensemble them into a single piece.” Since I wanted to use songs that were already on my phone, AND that most people wouldn’t be able to guess most of the songs that are on my phone, some of the songs are pretty easy…Also another problem I ran into was, when I uploaded the project to Soundcloud, it won’t let me embed the “song” onto this website? I mean it’s no serious problem, for you can still listen to it here. But it did tick me off a little.

Anyway, for this project I used my laptop’s Garageband and inserted songs I already had in my iTunes. After that, I picked out small fragments of the songs and cropped off the rest of the song. Then I uploaded it to Soundcloud. I did have fun with this project seeing what parts of the song I thought would be too easy or too hard to guess. Other than the embed thing, I had fun.

Another awesome assignment this week is to reverse a song and see who can guess it first! I thought this would be a fun little game so I decided to try it out. I first found the song, with the help of my room mate, I then tried to reverse the song in iMovie but I eventually found that Audacity was the best bet in reversing the song. Although it had the easiest option, I had some trouble getting it to export to MP3 format to upload to Sound Cloud. I was able to figure it out with the help of Jim Groom. You can find the song here, but I will put it down below as well.  So here it is! Let me know what song you think it is in the comments below!

For my first audio assignment, I did The Contest Nobody Could Win, where you put together one-second-clips from six different songs.

This was my first time using Audacity, and I have to admit that it was a bit frustrating. I was hoping the program would be on the same user-friendly level as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I definitely struggled at first figuring out how to select and trim the clips. The unfamiliar terminology also made it difficult, and the tutorials I found online were pretty complex and hard to pick out what I needed to know. Fortunately, through some trial and error (as well as verbally abusing Audacity), I managed to get it to work.

I first went into my iTunes library to see what relatively well known songs I had as I tend to listen to music that isn’t heard on pop radio or turned into cultural references, and I didn’t think it would be very smart to ask people to try and guess what the songs are if the songs didn’t have a decent amount of popularity surrounding them. I was also pretty lazy about it, and didn’t go through my whole music library, so all the artists’ names either begin with the letter A or B (not counting articles). I imported the songs into Audacity and organized the clips by release date, with the first song being released a long time ago and the last song being a summer 2014 hit.

For the most part, picking out what one second clip represented the song wasn’t too hard. There was one song where the part of it that stands out to me includes the title of the song, so I had to find something else that was just as noteworthy and recognizable. For some songs, there was a very specific part that only occurred a couple of times, so I had to be very precise with what clip I trimmed from it, while others repeated the recognizable part enough that I could just any second from a larger time range.

While I don’t think anything artistically revolutionary was accomplished by this assignment, it was a good way to get my feet wet with Audacity.

If you want to know what 6 songs I used, here are the answers.