With audio programs, making a song from scratch suddenly becomes really, really easy. Programs like GarageBand come with their own loop selection, but if you are using a different program, try downloading bass riffs or back beats and go to town! Or download beats from Youtube- wherever. The challenge is to make a song without recording anything yourself.
http://www.powtoon.com/presentoons/bGF3aqGIZaX/edit/#/
Take your favorite song. Remove the lyrics. Play only up to thirty seconds of the song. Listener must be able to guess.
If you had the opportunity to create your own theme music, what would it sound like? Get creative and create your own sounds or select an instrumental from Youtube or any other source that represents you well. If you are going the youtube route, remember to use VidtoMp3. Once you have selected your background music, find some sounds/effects to incorporate into it using Audacity or other editing software. You can find free sounds at SoundBible. Once completed, upload to Soundcloud and share it with us.
Music producer Nick Pittsinger slowed Bieber’s “U Smile” down 800% and the result was ethereal magic. Find a song to experiment with and slow it down to the point where it becomes an amazing piece of ambient music. If doing this with Audacity or any other non-linear digital editor, you’ll likely have to perform multiple lengthings of the song. Be sure to pitch shift so that even though the track is longer, it doesn’t become just a low pitched version (think of the sound used in a slow-mo moment of someone yelling Nooooooo).
Here are a couple of suggested task specific tools as well:
http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-2.2.2-OSX-10.6.dmg
TV and movies are full of product placement these days. Take a clip from a TV show or movie where they discuss a product (food, technology, movie, restaurant, etc. and turn it into a radio ad for that product.
For this assignment, make an audio track using found sounds or your own recordings that is creepy, spooky, scary, halloween-inspired. Make it more than a minute long so we have time to get scared!
For this assignment, take a song that you love, and record yourself doing a dramatic reading of the lyrics. Then take another piece of music (obviously without lyrics) and set your dramatic reading to it. This should result in something that sounds very different than the original song. Post both the original song (for comparrison) and your new dramatic reading remix in a blog post.
First, choose what you want to replicate using song lyrics. It can be a Wire epigraph, a nursery rhyme, a speech, a poem, anything really. Then find songs that have the words that you need in them. Put those songs into Audacity and take out the words that you need from those songs. Order the words, make them the same volume, and space them out/slow them down so you can understand what is being said. And there you have it, an epigraph, nursery rhyme, speech, or poem out of song lyrics!
Many artists sing songs about similar things or that each tell similar stories. Find an artist like this and choose five of their songs that you can make into one story. Using Audacity or another audio edting software, edit five or more songs by one artist into a new story! Use at least 5 songs and make the new song at least 5 minutes long. I recommend not uploading it to SoundCloud as it will likely be taken down due to copyright infringement, but you can still put it up on your blog and Twitter. Have fun with it!
