Working with Sound

Getting Started: Exercise One

We're going to hit the ground running by doing a quick exercise before you are presented with more of the deeper workshop content. For this exercise and exercise three, you are going to need to record yourself reading a text, the idea being that it is something you can record yourself saying more than once. I recommend a poem, a paragraph in a novel, part of a speech, song lyrics, whatever you want. For my example, I chose Wallace Steven’s poem “The Snowman,” which took about forty seconds to read out loud.

To conduct this exercise you must download and install audacity.
[video 1]

Next, you are going to do a quick recording. Choose the text you want to recite and do the following.
[video 2]

Troubleshooting help: If, when setting up Audacity, you have plugged in a mic that does not appear, restart the application. Mics that are plugged in after the app is launched won’t show in the dropdown menu. 

Watch about setting levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Liqm7AO9HgM
Read more about mono and stereo. 
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tracks_menu_add_new.html
Note exporting
In addition to saving files as an Audacity project, you can also export them in a variety of different formats, such as MP3s and WAV, which can be used on multiple platforms. You will learn how to export in exercise four.
For now, put your recording aside. We’ll get back to that later. Let’s think more about sound...

This page has paths: