IDeATe

Proposal

I've never truly made anything using sound design softwares. Therefore I'll work on sound remix this time. The theme song of Happy Tree Friend and the laugh of minions share a weird sense of attraction although neither of them are pleasant for us to listen. Mika's "Lolipop", in contrast, is one of the sweetest song I have ever heard. I want to see the collision among these elements.

This is just one of the ideas I've come up with. If this remix doesn't go well, I'll work on other ideas.

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Outcome

Sound Cloud Link:

https://soundcloud.com/user-347369405/lolipop-x-minions-x-happy-tree-friends

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Intention

I aim to create a piece of remix that conveys a sense of quirkiness by remixing the sound effect of Happy Tree Friend and the laugh of minions, with the song lollipop by Mika. I want people to unintentionally shake their head while listening to the remix.

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Context

I was inspired by the Looking-out Exercise I did for Module 2, which is the theme song of the cartoon Happy Tree Friend. I think the rhythm and tempo of this theme song is pretty "toxic", which I define as not that pleasant to hear but easy to get addict to. Then I began to recall other sound tracks or videos that share this theme feature.

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Process

The sources themselves are already popular so I didn't have much trouble obtaining resources. However since they are already popular, it took me a lot of time to filter and make selections. For instance, when finding the source for minions laugh, I dowloaded 5 different pieces of video and play each of them multiple times to see which one contain parts that fits to the tempo and tune of Lollipop.

Initially I planned to overlap the song lollipop completely with the sound effects of minions laugh and Happy Tree Friend. However after many failed attempts of perfectly matching the beats and tunes among these sources, I decide to use Lollipop as the base and let Happy Tree Friend and Minions laugh be add on effects to "decorate" Lollipop.

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Product

Resource: I gathered the audio files I need mostly from youtube, using videograbby to convert youtube videos to mp3 files.

Remixing: The software I used for remixing is Audacity. I used many features of audacity during the remix, such as cutting audio tracks, time-shifting, change speed and etc. I worked layer by layer and keep every layer documented so that I can make adjustments easily when the new effects I added couldn't work.

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Critique

Although my remix didn't sound as good as other remixes online, but this is the first time I use audacity to work on a sound project so I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome. There's a lot I can and need to improve, especially in technical aspect. For instance, the cut of audio clips can be done more cleanly, and the connection and overlap among layers can be less abrupt.

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Reflection

Technically, I become a little bit more familiar with Audacity and audio processing. There are lots of functions and features in audacity that I haven't tried, and I hope I can fix the problems of my first remix and make better work later.