Test your music knowledge – please don’t post your answers!
I did the “The Contest Nobody Could Win” assignment. It is a guessing game, where one must guess which songs make up a very short audio recording. Please don’t post your answers so that others can play too.
I used Audacity to create a mix of 6 one second segments from 6 different songs. I used Soundcloud to share the mix.
Although my mix is useful for nothing more than a guessing game, replacing the origin of the audio from songs to presidential speeches(for example) would be helpful for creating a combined theme of several speeches.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/68097384″ iframe=”true” /]
Anton: I’d like to push you on the idea you lay out at the end of this post. What might that look like, especially if you play with the restrictions of the format a bit? How might it turn into a historical argument? Or a “contest” — since that is the purpose of the assignment — that is fueled by a historical argument?
All that aside– the editing is a bit sloppy. Try to make equal size gaps between the audio clips. As much as anything, editing requires precision, requires you to put your ears on the head of the people who are going to be listening to what you produced.
I re-edited the audio.
Regarding the historical argument, honestly I think that you can’t make one out of everything and anything. It is unrealistic to think that a historical argument can be made out of a 5 second audio bit containing six, less than one second, bits.
Like we determined in class already, ds106 did not post these assignments with a historical argument in their mind. They are meant to familiarize us with audio mixing which, as a skill, can definitely help us with our projects.
When I wrote about mixing six different presidential speeches instead of six songs, I meant mixing larger portions of those speeches. Attempting to mix one second bits, assuming that an average person says two words per second, would give us about twelve words. Perhaps you can choose twelve most popular words used in president’s speeches, using text mining tool and attempt to form a sentence using those words. The resulting sentence might reveal the overall theme of all speeches, or you might end up with something just because you were looking for it. However, most likely you will end up with twelve words that make no sense whichever order you put them in. Like the original assignment states, this is meant to be a contest, a game.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – Sigmund Freud
Combining longer bits is a whole different “game.” Here you can do several things, for example, you can compare whether the same point has been made in different speeches, using different words. You can find contradictions and play them one after another. Hearing them together could damage the reputation of a candidate, and potentially influence an election. In my opinion, the mixing is viable for comparison purposes more than anything else.