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.