2 stars

For the remainder of my audio assignment stars, I did the Beat Craigslist assignment, where we read a Craigslist ad that has interesting wording, and then record it like a beat poem.

I love Craigslist. The majority of furniture in my house was obtained from the free section of Craigslist. You could say I’m a Craigslist connoisseur. Sometimes you come across hysterical things on the site, which why this assignment in particular really jumped out to me.

I perused Craigslist for a long time trying to find an ad that would work, but nothing really jumped out at me. I saw something about “chiguaguas,” but other than that nothing really looked good. So I decided to take the audio and twist it a little bit. Instead of treating it like beat poetry, I actually made it into beat poetry! I took three interesting ads and turned the subject mater into Haikus using the traditional 5-7-5 syllable pattern, and then recorded it. The three haikus I wrote were based off of the Haunted Gnome, the Air Hockey Table and the Watermelon Contest for Chickens.

To make it, I first recorded my voice saying the haikus, then went searching for a backbeat. I couldn’t find one I liked that felt appropriately jazzy, so I made one using two bass riffs from the Garageband loop database. It was definitely extremely easy to do- the hardest part was probably just finding the Craigslist ads I liked!

This assignment was to find an ad on Craig’s List and record it like a beat poem, adding jazz accents. This is the ad that I found about a broken tv:

I found some jazz accents on freesound.org and uploaded it into audacity. Then I recorded myself reading the ad. This is what it looks like in Audactiy:

I uploaded it to soundcloud, and here you have it!

Trolling Craigslist is always fun, so the first audio assignment listed on Week 5′s page immediately jumped out at me.  Off I went to the local Craiglist “free” section and found this lovely post:

Sounds strange enough to me!!  Why anyone would want to take on such an awful job for “free cactus” is beyond me…but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

I started to think of audio and a western theme came quickly to mind.  Cactus=desert=western movie, right?  (Never mind that these cacti live in the Walnut Grove area of the south, where ever that is).  I went to Soundcloud and searched “western”.  I selected this track:

The track itself is quite a bit longer than I needed and has several different parts.  I saved the file, played it on my computer and recorded the portion I liked using Audacity.  (Which is a very low-fi way of doing things, but it seemed to serve my purposes.)

Next I wrote out the Craigslist ad on paper with breaks for where I wanted to pause of emphasize a word.  After reading out loud a few times to get the hang of it, I pressed “record” and recorded my voice using Audacity.

I then got to work layering the two audio files and trying my best to improve the sound.  I started with the background music as the “base” file.  Next, I imported my voice and time delayed it by a second or two to allow the music to set the stage, as it were.  The music was a bit louder than what I needed though, so I used the envelope tool to lower the volume on the background music.

Next, I cut off the extra background music I didn’t need, but left a few seconds on the end, which I faded out after the voice recording was finished.  And voila! A spoken word masterpiece is born:

I was much quicker in loading Soundcloud files on this post- I didn’t have to consult help to remember how to do it correctly.  I did have to go back to the Audacity screencast to re-learn how to do pretty much everything except record.  Hopefully Audacity gets easier; I’m still not finding it to be very intuitive.  I did have some blips with Audacity in that I couldn’t import the .aup files I had saved–I had to export them to MP3 and then import them from MP3 format.  Not a big deal, but a moment of panic when I thought I couldn’t use the files I had made.