Exploring Audacity

Audio Editing

This week our main focus was to learn how to work with audio using the computer program Audacity.

Students learned how to:

• download audio files from both the sd67 portal and from sound effects websites
• import audio into Audacity
• cut sections of audio
• add a second audio track
• move audio tracks

A screenshot showing audio tracks in Audacity.

Students chose one of the audio recordings of the 'When Suddenly...' stories we had made in earlier classes and then chose sounds effects to go with the stories.  The emphasis was on exploring and learning new skills and not trying to come up with a final polished product.  

We are using Audacity because the school district has it on its list of approved software, but it would be my first choice anyway since it has lots of great functions and it is free, open source software.  If any of the students really gets into working with audio, they can download a free copy for Mac, Linux or Windows.  See the Audacity tab on this website for more info as well as short some short video tutorials on how to do the basics in Audacity.

Microphone Skills and Storytelling

This week we tried a different storytelling activity called 'Once Upon A Time'.  Before starting the story each person was asked to think of a person, place or thing.  We then went around the class with each person contributing a sentence to the story, but they had to include their person place or thing in the story.  It was pretty fun and we got some interesting stories!  We recorded the stories again using the field recorder.  Students are getting quite good at holding the microphone the correct distance from their mouth and at a good angle so as to avoid getting popping sounds (plosives). 

Coming Up

Pretty soon students will be ready to do their own recordings and editing them.  That's when things will really get interesting!

Thanks for checking in to see what we've been up to.