To Infinity, and Beyond!

Well, since I did the rest of my stuff for the week and was bored today, I decided to come up with another assignment and complete it so I can add it to the assignment bank. I recreated a nursery rhyme using lyrics out of songs. Here is what I uploaded to Audacity (hopefully it doesn’t get taken down):

How I did it:

Well this took significantly longer than I thought it would to make. First I picked my nursery rhyme that I wanted to do–I used “Hush Little Baby” (but you could use an epigraph from The Wire, a nursery rhyme, a poem, a speech, anything really, have fun with it!). Then I thought about songs that would have words from the nursery rhyme. The list of songs I used is pretty long, at least longer than I thought it would  have been. I used: Single Ladies-Beyonce, Hush-Deep Purple, How Forever Feels-Kenny Chesney, Mockingbird-Toby Keith, Wagon Wheel-Old Crow Medicine Show, I Won’t Let Go-Rascal Flatts, and Songs About Me-Trace Adkins.

I imported them one song at a time and found the words that I needed from them. I grabbed words by highlighting the section of the song that I needed and clicking EDIT>DUPLICATE. I listened to most of the song to get all of the words that I could from each song. Most songs I used more than one word from. Then once I had all of the words I needed (which took FOREVER), I ordered them. I could have done them out of order but it is a lot easier for my brain to operate when there is order. I moved tracks up and down and duplicated tracks until I had all of the words in the right order.

Then I made them all butt up next to each other so that they sounded like an actual sentence. Originally I was going to say “going to” instead of “gonna” so I had to cut out my “to”s in favor of the “gonna” that I already had. I then highlighted the whole thing and clicked EFFECT>EQUALIZATION to make all of the clips’ volumes the same to make it less distracting. Then, while the whole selection was still highlighted I clicked EFFECT>CHANGE TEMPO and I slowed it down by 25%. I sent it to my boyfriend and he said it was too fast so I slowed it down so it was more understandable. Some words were too long, though, like “Mockingbird” so I had to speed them back up 25% and move everything around so they were the right distance apart again.

It was easy after I had all of my words–the hardest part was actually getting the words from the songs. I also figured out that it is easier to move the tracks if when you are on the arrow tool you click in the middle of a track rather than on the edge of it. They move nicely that way. So maybe my issues with track moving are over! (Hopefully).

I am now going to submit this assignment so others can enjoy the agony of it as well! I hope you enjoy!

Here is the link to my assignment!