The main mood of this piece is supposed to be somber at the beginning, and gets louder and more angry towards the end, as my reading gets more angry the further into the passage I read.
Voice Processing: I used the noise reduction effect to try and get rid of most of the sounds of me breathing or licking my lips as a talked. Some of that sound is still included, but the overall noise in my voice recording is greatly reduced. Besides the noise, the rest of my recording was of pretty good quality, and I didn't edit it more than that, or to edit the gain of my layers to make sure one wasn't too loud compared to another.
Loops: For my main background layer, I use the song called "All is Violent, all is Bright" by God is an Astronaut. This song's main feature is the repetition of the main melody that is repeated throughout the song with subtle variations, so I used just the beginning of the song as one layer without breaking it up and using smaller loops, because with the subtle variations between one repetition of the melody and another, they didn't fit together well if broken up. This layer ends up being one long "loop" that is only repeated once. The main issue with using an mp3 is that it had already been mastered, and because of that was very loud, and I had to use a custom amplification in order to make the loud sounds quieter so the beginning of the song (which is very quiet) wouldn't be lost. The compression tool didn't sound good upon preview, so I did custom de-amplification.
Concepts from Beginning: When thinking about the introduction to my piece, I wanted to augment the cresendi that is already apparent in the main background layer that I use, and added in an unresolved harmony by introducing this beat at the beginning that falls away before I start speaking. This beat is taken straight from the beginning of "I Be on That" by Childish Gambino, with the gain edited and a proper fade added in for smoothness in transitioning between the different layers. For this piece, I wanted to focus on the mood, which is slightly angry and sad, and this beat sets a tone of expectancy but also unresolved tone as it ends and the sadder background layer takes over. The listener is on edge, and the piece continues to set the listener on edge by the overall tone. My piece can thus be broken up into two main sections, the introduction and the speaking part.