For one of my audio assignments this week I did The Contest Nobody Could Win which was worth two stars.  For this assignment you had to “take six very short fragments (less than one second each) from six different songs and ensemble them into a single piece.”  The only rules that there were to this assignment were “1) do not repeat songs 2) do not use covers (unless the cover is much better than the original, sh*t happens) 3) John Cage’s 4’33” is not a song!!!”

I was right away drawn to this assignment because my family always like to play the game guess that song with the radio.  While I think I am pretty good at this game, I can honestly say I take a bit more than a second to guess the song most of the time.

This assignment was pretty easy to do.  I just imported songs out of my iTunes and straight into audacity. I then cut out everything but about the first second of every song.  I did this six times and then imported them together.  I decided to leave a little bit of time in between each song so that you could have a second or two to try to recognize the songs.

Here is a picture of what it looked like when I had it all edited together:

Any idea what any of these are?

Two Stars Down!

When I’m driving, I can’t look down at my iPod to see what song is playing to determine if I want to keep listening to it (at least not safely). So, I’m a pro at figuring out songs before even a second of the song plays.

That’s why I took on this assignment for this week.

I listened to some other DS106ers’ assignments, and most people put the songs together, one after another. I really didn’t like all the songs being close together, because you can’t hear them start and finish. When I hear these radio contests, they don’t do it like that. So I went in another direction.

Radio shows also don’t make it impossible by picking the most random piece of the song to trick their listeners. They want people to know the song, so that’s what I did. I found popular songs and then cut out a part that most people would recognize.

I used Audacity again for this one since it was a simple cut and paste assignment.

I took songs from my iTunes library and imported them into Audacity one by one. Cut them down to under a second each and put about 2 seconds between each so they would be distinct pieces.

For this Assignment, we had to take little clips of songs and put them into one little clip.  There’s six.  I’ll let you guess what they are.

I literally picked 6 random songs out of my iTunes and loaded them into Audacity.  Copied and pasted less than a second into the same clip and that was it.

It’s math time!!! I know you all have been dying for some good math times, I certainly know I have. Curious as to where I got this amazing title from? Simply check out this great song and you’ll understand. I took the 2 star assignment of The Contest Nobody Could Win a bit too literal (yet not literal at the same time). How could I do that you say? It’s simple. It was not literal because I did remixes of what I think to be popular songs. The literal part is that nobody can win since they aren’t actually real songs, and there is math involved (so that means I automatically win?).

Yes that is right, I have been busy working on all of my ds106 stuff for the two weeks so that I can really focus on all of the radio show (which is coming along really well after our meeting online). So when I had the opportunity to create a very very short story with different songs I got right to work. Typically I would do something Disney oriented, but it seems as though Disney is very on top of their copyright, and loading onto SoundCloud would not go so smoothly.

I decided then that math would be my topic of interest. I’ve known for a while now about different people putting up remakes of popular songs and incorporating calculus terminology in it. What I didn’t know was that I would spend about 2 hours in the library watching all of them (what can I say? I am a nerd). When trying to cut out certain sections I wanted to make sure it was popular tunes that people would recognize the original song.

The process of making this was similar to any other process that I have done, lots and lots of planning. For starters, while looking at different videos, I would note the ones with better audio quality. If you can’t hear the words, why should I use the clip? Once I had the six videos that I wanted to use, I picked clips from each and I tried to make them as short as possible. As usual, I put them in a word document and played around with the order, a lot. I had something completely different at first and didn’t like it. Order matters so much. So here is my final product, which I really love a lot!

All of the clips came from YouTube, which I tuned into an mp3 using the Fastest YouTube Downloader. I then imported them into Audacity and used the crop selection tool to delete parts that I did not want. The zoom tool proves very useful for this, especially when the song is quick. Once I was comfortable with the ordering of everything, I exported it into an mp3 and uploaded it to SoundCloud.

To see the creative minds themselves, look at the remixes I used:

Time for Calculus (tune of Single Ladies)

I Will Derive (tune of I Will Survive)

Calculus Rhapsody (tune of Bohemian Rhapsody)

Fresh Prince of BC (tune of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song)

Derive So Hard (tune of Ball So Hard (this original is a bit explicit))

I Integrate By Parts (tune of Total Eclipse of the Heart)

And finally, here is what my Audacity looks like:

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa