Can You Hear Me Now?

Moving away from digital images, the third assignment in this class was to work with digital audio. We were tasked with creating a promotional audio track of at least two tracks joined together with some music.

For this project, we used Audacity, gloriously free and easy to use software. The link has been added to Clickety Von Linkety. Upon opening Audacity, it would not be uncommon to feel somewhat intimidated when faced with technical aspects of audio manipulation that Audacity offers. As said before in this blog however, the best way to learn new software applications is to explore the application and play with all the features it offers.

I found Audacity to be pretty straightforward for my intents and purposes (which was to create an advertisement for a scholarship program at the University of Southern Mississippi). Much of the audio editing was very similar to word processing editing in that the software allows you to highlight and copy or delete or move, just as you can with words in a document. There was also a nice selection of sound effects available. I used “fading in” and “fading out” to smooth out the rough edges of my clip. In the track, I had my husband read a quote originally given by Dr. Ronald E. McNair. I was able to change the speed and pitch of my husband’s voice so that it did not sound like him speaking at all.

This has obvious benefits for business application, as I was able to create an advertisement with it. With some practice and polish, advertisements for radio could easily be made. As I have indicated previously in this blog, I work in the legal industry and often handle evidence. Just as I was able to improve the quality of photographic evidence using Picnik, I could use Audacity to prepare audio evidence for a jury. The editing features in Audacity would allow me to loop a specific track of audio so that it could be played over and over or join audio tracks together so that they could be listened to without the distraction of switching from track to track. These minute details can be crucial in presenting evidence to a jury.

Personally, this software could easily be used to send personal greetings, dedications, or instructions. It could also be a fun (FREE) way to create personalized ring tones.

Below is the link to my Audacity audio project:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11473989/LindaWynn-assign3%2822050%29.mp3