ReMiX tHiNg GoEs In, ReMiX tHiNg CoMeS oUt

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I fudged the Movie Music Comparison assignment a little—the second song I used is from a video game, not a movie. However, I’m once again invoking The First Rule and arguing that because a modern video game is technically an interactive cinematic storytelling experience (stick THAT in your rhetoric and chew on it, new media majors!) it still qualifies for this assignment. Plus, I’d be remiss in NOT working ValvE games into absolutely everything I do.

The two songs I used for this assignment are the utterly glorious “Sora” from the Escaflowne movie…

And the ending theme from the first Portal game, slowed down by 800%:

I used the YouTube Doubler tool to test my hunch that the two would sound really interesting together, and when I found that hunch was correct, all it took was a little bit of creative editing in Audacity to create my remix.

All things considered, I could have done more to try and get the beats of these two songs to match up a bit better, or tried to change the key of “Still Alive” to make it match “Sora,” but I was kind of fascinated by the results. The ways that the songs occasionally match up and harmonize beautifully is weirdly mesmerizing, and the dark tone that “Portal” lends to “Sora” when they’re more dissonant creates a really cool contrast, especially at the very end. Overall I’m quite pleased with how this assignment turned out, and I may have to try it again with others songs in my free time!

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PLEASE ENJOY YOUR MUSICALLY AUGMENTED AUDITORY EXPERIENCE

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And THAT, ladies, gentlemen and test subjects, is how you bumper some gosh-darn radio, Aperture Labs style.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Portal franchise, I have a few words for you. First: WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?? No, seriously, you need to reevaluate your existence, and then play Portal. Second: if for some reason you disregard my first point, the bumper I created is mimicking the speech of a homicidal AI from the video game I mentioned before, an utter gem of a program named GLaDOS. She’s kind of incredible but also demented, and her voice has become one of many iconic elements from the smash-hit game.

I was just about ready to murder the “Create a ds106 radio bumper assignment” by the time I finished with it, so I guess I met Prof. Burtis’ criteria for a good radio assignment. The biggest issue I ran into for creating my radio bumper was that the tutorial I’d relied on to create this voice effect last year is no longer quite effective, probably due to some updates to Melodyne, one of the programs necessary for creating this effect. I tweaked the tutorial a bit, most notably in that I recorded my own vocals with my handheld digital recorder and then converted those files to .WAV format using Online-Converter.com. After that, I used Audacity for basic editing and the 30-day free trial of a super detail-oriented audio editor called Melodyne, which I mentioned earlier, to flatten and modulate the pitch of my voice until it sounded like GLaDOS.

I’m still not 100% happy with how it turned out–like I said, last time I tried this tutorial the result was a lot better, maybe because of the way I spoke the original audio and not the tutorial itself?–and I’m unsure about how effective it’ll be as a radio bumper, but I have to let this thing rest and move on to my other assignments for the week. I hope at the very least somebody gets a kick out of this when it plays!

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