Audio Playground 1

The prompt for this assignment was to give a person a “tour” of a place that we are familiar with. Through class discussion and the example given on the assignment page, I was able to realize that this “place” need not be an actual place. It could be an abstract concept or a point in time. Since I am an avid concert-goer and metal fan, I decided to give someone who doesn’t go to many concerts a tour of the first song of a metal band.

The music was written by myself as basically a rip off of Metallica, particularly Master of Puppets. I tried to include crowd noises to really simulate the feeling of being in a large arena space. I wish I could have included a guitar solo, but a combination of me losing my guitar pick and worries about the length project prevented me from doing so. With the narration, I attempted to capture that feeling of a large crowd that has become kind of unified through the music while also including other senses like smell in order to provide a more complete picture of the setting. The noises from the crowd were taken from Freesound.org. All other noises (music, narration, and the singer clip) were all produced by me.

I did run into issues when trying to edit the volume levels of the music. For some reason, GarageBand was resetting the volume on a couple tracks whenever I would press play. All of the automation that I had designated was ignored in favor of the default volume. I was able to find a solution by exporting those tracks as new audio files that I imported into the original project. After that, I reprogrammed the volume automation and it worked without further issue.