Activity 3: Record Audio
Activity 4: Edit Audio
I cut out a bunch of the long pauses I took in my reading as I felt they were too long and might lead to the listener disengaging. I had originally put the pauses in so the reading did not sound rushed and I had some wiggle room.
Activity 5: Use Audio Filters
I attempted to equalize the audio in this clip as I found the drastic change in volume from the introduction to the soft speaking voice of the presenter to be jarring. I only worked with a small portion. I struggled to find a way to amplify the presenter’s voice without also doing so for the background noise. The age of the recording did not assist in this process. Focusing on a specific part of the audio was also difficult as the marks were minutes rather than seconds. Some further investigation will have to be done for how to adjust longer audio presentations.
Activity 6: Combine Audio Files
Mixing the tracks was reminiscent of Garageband from the early 2000’s. I wanted to add some ocean ‘bumpers’ to draw readers in and ease them out of the recording. As a challenge, I added some gull cries in the middle of the presentation. I am still trying to figure out the timing of the audio to milliseconds, which I think would make it easier to tweak the finer details.
March 27, 2023 at 12:05 am
Hi Kate-Nicola,
You’ve done pretty well here with recording and editing. Normalization isn’t a feature that Audacity is known for. I try to do this once a year when I make a mixed CD for summer vacation road trips, but even with the tool-set from iTunes, there are human judgements in normalization.
The old audio clip has a significant amount of background noise. You can suppress most of it but if you try for perfection you will end up with a tinny voice remaining. I would always recommend that you try to clean audio as much as you can before amplifying sections of it to achieve a consistent audio level.