Since it’s remix/mashup week, I thought I’d take another shot at putting words to music. I guess I got the idea from the OER20 conference. I listened to some of it with ds106radio playing in the background, and once I got the balance between the talk and the background right, it was pretty cool.
I’ve done these experiments before, but Soundcloud has objections. If I keep at it eventually I might come up with something worthwhile. This time I decided to go with Creative Commons and Public Domain work, to avoid the Soundcloud problem.
I went to Librivox to look for a Lovecraft poem, and found one in a collection. I don’t know the poem or the reader, so What the Moon Brings was a pretty random choice. I decided to do a sort of A/B experiment with it, and went to CC Search to find a horror soundtrack and a happy soundtrack from Soundcloud. Again, I wasn’t really selective in my choices. The reading is in the five minute range, so I looked for tracks that were close enough. The different backgrounds do have an effect:
I put these together in Audacity. With the reading, I clipped the opening and closing, so it was just the text of the work. I applied the Amplify effect and then the Compressor effect, both times using the default settings. The happy soundtrack was a little shorter than the reading, so I also used the Change Tempo effect to shorten it to 250 seconds. The background was very loud so I used the volume slider to bring it down. I adjusted the alignment of the tracks so that the music comes in after the opening sentence, but other than that let things fall where they would. The horror soundtrack ran a little longer than the reading, so I used a Fade Out and cut the end off.
So what do I do with this? What do I take from it? I think what I need to do is find something meaningful to work with, rather than random elements. This I will ponder. Here’s Black Grape to play us out:
