Sounds Like Music

Last week we had 2 days training on creating sounds and music. The first day consisted of an overview of Audacity, which I had used once before when we created our digital stories. It was good to have a more detailed rundown on how to use this software. We were also given a general overview of the different file formats for music such as mp3, wav, aiff, oggs and midis. I hadn't previously realised that midis work abit like xml files, in that they are a way to store information and a 'container' for music. For instance, on the second day we had a look at Reason and imported some music midi files. I used the track 'Men in Black' and assigned different instruments to e.g. the drums, guitar etc on the track. It sounded similar to the original, but not the same. On the first day on Audacity we all recorded our voices with reading out lines of a section in the novel Moby Dick, and then saved them as wav files. We then imported them all into Audacity and tried to alter the levels of each person's file to obtain similar sound levels. We were also taught about 'clipping' which means when the sound that has been recorded or imported is too loud and 'clips'. You can then then use the effect of 'normalising' the levels to sort this out.

It was a helpful couple of days, although I think I will need to practice making music in Reason to become more comfortable with it.