Just Do It

Intention

Karen

I made this because I wanted to play with musical composition and garageband. Garageband is actually extremely simple to use and the 8-beat tracks make it easy to make a cohesive piece.

I served a relatively take rap-like beat with Shia Lebouf overlayed over a bunch of drum beats, with some synths over that. 

Layer #2

Server: Alice 

I overlayed calming violin music with the original piece. I thought that it contrasted well with the aggressive tone of the piece which was passed to me. I used GarageBand to do this by getting the audio from a youtube video and then placing it with the meme, adjusting volumes so that the violin was present but not overwhelming the original. 

Layer #3

Server: Min

From the verse "dream comes true", I thought about inserting the song dream comes true in the audio. So I searched on Youtube to find the song [dream comes true] and inserted two verses of it to the audio. I inserted the verses "Come with me" and "Take my hand" to make some sense with contents that are already there.

I used audacity to cut the existing audio and paste the selected tunes in. I used fade in and fade out effect so that the mp3 file does not feel like they are from all different songs.

Layer #4

My second layer redistributed the left/right of the sound because the original made my ears hurt, and I added more noise in the form of the history of japan video sped up and assorted other memes.

-Karen

Layer #5

Who served it?

What was the 'volley' you served? What did you create and how did it respond to the previous material? What is it composed with (materials, shapes, forms)? Describe the textures, colors, etc.

Alice served layer three...

I added the introduction tune of Sandstorm to Darude to the mp3 file. I did this because overlaying another layer would make it very difficult to listen to because it is already so layered. By adding to the beginning, it would be clearer to the audience what was going on. I chose Sandstorm because the song itself is sort of a meme. It is quite popular and at the very least, it is easily recognized. There are no textures or colors which have been added to the meme, except in the beginning where the intro stands alone and is quite apparent. The meme is already pretty textured, to the point that I wanted to avoid adding any more texture over the main audio clip because it gets overwhelming.

Layer #6

Server: Min

As a final touch, I inserted stretched [just do it] in the background of the whole audio. Paulstrech makes a given sound very long, producing a unique sound effect. I thought since this audio meme has so much in it already, it could be a good approach to go back to the beginning and put something from the original source. 

This was done in audacity using paulstrech effect.

Approach/Process

Outline your approach to the project? How did you approach reworking of media in a collaborative way? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them?

I used garageband on my initial layer and audacity on my second because I wanted to work with more software and get as much practice as possible.

-Karen

The approach I took was to add more flavor and texture to the clip. At the same time I tried not to override or delete some other people's work to make it collaborative. The challenges were lack of skill with audio tool and time. It was hard to come up with a good direction and a method to execute that idea in 30 minutes.

-Min

Reflection

Reflect on the process of making this project. What did you learn? How does it relate to what you know about spreadable media? What would you do differently?

Doing an audio meme was quite a challenge. Because we were all new to using audio editing programs such as GarageBand, the 30 minutes was spent playing around with switches and buttons, and less of the time and energy went into creating the meme material. However, because it was very different from other media that are more familiar, a lot was learned about these audio programs and it definitely helped us realize how difficult it is to work with audio sources and to remix without adding too much sound. It relates to spreadable media because spreadable media is usually pretty simple and very catchy or easy to reproduce. However, our product differed from that because it was very noisy and not a particularly clean or simple sound. In the future, we could add less layers to resolve this problem. 

Sources

Cite and attribute any sources you used directly in your project. Document this carefully: be very clear about what media you worked with, where you found it and how/where it was incorporated.

Alice's layers: 

Top 10 Solos from the Violin Repertoire, uploaded to Youtube by Will Jackson.

Sandstorm by Darude, 2001. Audio from Youtube.

Shia Lebouf Just Do It (youtube)

SNL skit (youtube)

history of japan (youtube)

-Karen

Dream comes true(youtube)

-Min