Notes for Class No. 5

Presentation of MaKey MaKey Board Instruments (conclusion), Working with Sounds in Audacity, and Introduction to Assignment No. 2

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

A video of this class is (or will be) posted at: http://echo360.uml.edu/heines2016/comp-mued2120.html

Handouts and Materials

Audacity Guides
Prof. Dan Walzer created instructional videos for you that we have posted on YouTube
- Adjustable Fades —> http://youtu.be/Ar9Wn-NwBK0
- Advanced EQ and Filters —> http://youtu.be/2WI4XluI0vw
- Dynamics Processing with Leveler —> http://youtu.be/INGaqH_eFqU
- Fade Out and Delay —> http://youtu.be/uxsSdMZa7dU
- Simple EQ and Volume All —> http://youtu.be/hOgu26L4MB0
Dan has also created a simple mixing guide for Audacity
there are many other Audacity guides on the web and tutorial videos on YouTube
- just search for them
Assignment No. 2
Computational Zeppelin Scratch Program

Announcements / Reminders

Assignment No. 1 Issues

Please check your email address on the course roster page

when I tried to email students over the weekend about problems with their Assignment No. 1 submissions I found that a number of addresses were wrong

Many students have emailed me links to their Scratch programs as requested in class and on Piazza

I appreciate that, but most people didn’t put MUED-2120 or COMP-2120 in their email subject headers
please do this

Also, don’t forget to answer the reflective questions for this assignment

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1NaNxvFazvwv8WQ9o7nI2EH9IN8vhm3sN6i7vHrVghTo/viewform

Course Website Issue

Some students have written to me about the fact that when you go to http://soundthinking.uml.edu using Google Chrome, you get a security warning

This is a security warning because http://soundthinking.uml.edu actually redirects to https://teaching.cs.uml.edu/~heines/91.212/91.212-2015-16s/212home.jsp which uses an older security method than Google Chrome likes. The solution is to click the Advanced link at the bottom left. Chrome will then display the following message and provide a link to proceed to the website.

This server could not prove that it is soundthinking.uml.edu; its security certificate is from teaching.cs.uml.edu. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.

Proceed to soundthinking.uml.edu (unsafe)

I assure you that it is OK to proceed to the website, so you can click the link to proceed.

Class Notes

Related reading for this class: Audacity Guides

Completion of MaKey MaKey board instrument presentations

Audacity Composition Example — Eric Fairbanks’s “Lever Drumitar” — Sound Thinking, Spring 2009

Side View (click the image for a larger view)

Top View (click the image for a larger view)

With Pick (click the image for a larger view)

Sounds

Original Recording

Audacity Composition

Audacity Composition Remix

Audacity Screen Capture (click the image to see it in its full size)

Notes on playing audio files from web pages with the HTML5 <audio> element

do a View->Source on this page to see how the <audio> tag is used so that it works on all of these browsers
- Safari appears to support playing MP3 files, but not OGG files
- Firefox appears to support playing OOG files, but not MP3 files
- Chrome appears to support both
you can download a free program called “FreeMp3WmaOggConverter” to convert between these file types from:
http://download.cnet.com/windows/freemp3wmaoggconverter/3260-20_4-6304840.html?tag=mncol
another good free converter is the DVDVideoSoft set of tools from:
http://dvdvideosoft.com
yet another, which is part of a more sophisticated set of audio and video tools, is the AVS Audio Converter from:
http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Audio-Converter.aspx
a fourth is the NCH Software Switch Audio File Converter from:
http://www.nch.com.au/switch/
there is a good explanation of the OGG file format at:
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-ogg-file-format.htm

Audacity References and Resources

Audacity - Quick Guide by Tim Brooks (distributed in class)

A Beginner’s Guide to Audacity (also distributed in class)

https://itunesu.boisestate.edu/audacity_basic.pdf

The Latest Official Audacity Manual ...

... is available from within your Audacity installation

or online at http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Audacity Tutorials

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Category:Tutorial
- links to officially sanctioned tutorials
and don’t forget the tutorials in the manual available in Audacity itself as shown above

Working With Sounds in Audacity

Get Audacity loaded on your system if you have not already done so

http://www.audacityteam.org/download/

there are versions there for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems
the latest version as of January 31, 2016, is now 2.1.2
- note that there are different drivers for Windows 7 and Windows 10
- you may not have to worry about these
- just install Audacity and see if it works for you

The goal for today is to get Audacity installed and to use it to edit, manipulate, and combine the sounds and create a new composition

We will demonstrate the following techniques so that you can try them out

cutting and pasting sound clips
putting clips together smoothly, perhaps fading them in and out
removing noise if it exists (extraneous background noise inadvertently recorded with your found sound)
change pitch, speed, and/or tempo
perhaps elongating or reversing clips
perhaps changing clip dynamics
perhaps normalizing clips to achieve even sounds

There are of course numerous other things you can try, but remember that the object is to create a new composition

thus, don’t only experiment randomly, although that is a reasonable way to learn and discover what you can do
rather, try to envision the sound you want and figure out how to create that by manipulating your found sounds

Installing the LAME Library

The LAME library is a file that is required for Audacity to be able to write MP3 files.

You can get this file from: http://lame.buanzo.org

From that page, download:

the latest version of the LAME encoder for Windows is still v3.99.3
the latest version of the LAME encoder for Mac OS X is still v3.98.2

When you run one of these programs, it will install the Lame library on your system

remember where it installed this library!
the first time you want to export an MP3 file, Audacity will ask you for the location of this file
thus, you’ll need to remember where you put it so that you can tell Audacity

For Music majors, please note that on the Macintosh systems in Durgin 406, the LAME library is located along the following path

Applications > Lame > package > usr > local > lib > libmp3lame.dylib

UMass Lowell Dept. of Computer Science

COMP 2120 / MUED 2120 — Sound Thinking

Spring 2016 Semester, Section 201

Prof. Jesse M. Heines and Prof. Gena Greher