Elizabeth and I teamed up again to work on our audio pieces for Comm Lab this week. Although we did record audio from the streets of NY together for last week’s assignment, we decided not to use any of it and instead decided to choose a pressing socio-political theme of the current economic “crisis.” I took photos and recorded audio from an anti-bailout protest on Wall Street last month. We were particularly attracted to some snippets from a speech given by the charismatic looking gentleman pictured above. We also used samples of other protesters chanting slogans, and put everything over a beat that I composed. In some amazing coincidence, almost all of our samples fit over the beats at 109 BPM. Only one sample of chanting protesters had to be slightly stretched in Audacity to fit the tempo.
The danceable audio anger that resulted from our musical collaborations reminds me a little bit of the Muppets doing N.W.A. And for further musical explorations relating to pigs, I suggest NIN’s Piggy and March of the Pigs.
Elizabeth describes more of our process in her blog:
We used several applications to make the piece. We cut up the audio in Fission, a commercial software for simple cutting. It is really usable. The beats were composed in iDrum…. We used Audacity to change the length of some of the audio pieces so that they all had the same beat. Then we assembled the song in Garage Band.
