For my next design assignment this week I did “Interview/Music Mashup” (3 stars). I loved the example that was posted on the assignment page, as well as some of the other people’s takes on it. They all turned out super funny so I figured I would give it a try. I think the hardest part for me was figuring out who to interview and what to ask them about. I thought about doing something about Ebola but I figured that would be hard to find songs for. Then I thought about interviewing Ray Rice about beating his then-fiance or Reggie Bush about beating his kid but I figured those hit a little too close to home (and also may be hard to find songs for). So I decided to go with the big news around DC right now, the fact that Kirk Cousins will be the starter for the Washington Redskins for the remainder of their season.

First, the interview:

Here is the list of songs and artists that I used:

This Is Our Time by Kenny Chesney

Honky Tonk Badonkadonk by Trace Adkins

We are the Champions by Queen

All Jacked Up by Gretchen Wilson

And the Crowd Goes Wild by Mark Wills

Angry All the Time by Tim McGraw

It was actually a lot easier to choose questions and songs than I expected it to be. I thought that would be the hardest part but it turned out that choosing the person to interview and the topic was the hardest part.

How I did it:

First I made a Word document with all of the questions that I wanted to ask and thought of songs for them as I made them. I found the lyrics to the songs using Google. Then when I picked the part of the song I wanted to put the lyrics in the Word document so that I would remember which part of the song I needed once I downloaded it. I downloaded them from YouTube using a YouTube to mp3 converter. When I did that for all of the songs I needed, I opened Audacity. I recorded all of the questions first so that I would have them all there. I then imported the songs one at a time as I got to the questions that they answered. I had to listen to the song to find the right part and delete the parts that I didn’t need. I did that for all of the songs and then lined them up so they sounded natural. I then selected all and clicked on Effect>Normalize to make all of the different clips the same volume. Then I saved it as an audacity file and exported it as an MP3 file. I uploaded it to Twitter and the Hub via Known and uploaded it to SoundCloud separately (I can’t figure out why it won’t work).

I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed making it!