To begin, I would like to say that I had a lot of fun with my radio art project. I would like to start by making it clear that to me this project was more about exploration and experimentation than anything else. Before entering into the studio I really did not know what to expect. My experience with any musical software ranges from extremely little to non-existent. After my first session with John, I left the studio completely overwhelmed. I remember writing everything down that John was explaining, so that next time it would be much easier for me to navigate my way through the program. In a way I was a bit naive about how much information there is to know about just one program such as "Cool Edit".

Upon leaving the studio I decided to take John's advice and start off with something straight forward, such as recording a spoken word bit, and then using the features that "Cool Edit" has to alter the piece in different ways.

The piece I recorded was an excerpt from the motion picture "The Jungle Book" (one on my many vinyls [records] that I use to manipulate sounds in the context of a live performance) that was about a minute long. The first objective I wanted to accomplish was to try and rid the recording of its old vinyl sounds, such as cracks. pops, and just the old plain fuzzy sounds associated with old vinyl. To accomplish this process I used the noise reduction feature on the "Cool Edit" program. To erase as much of the unwanted sounds as I could, I had to repeat this process six or seven times drawing from various samples throughout the recorded selection.

After being satisfied with how much cleaner the selection sounded, I then proceeded to use the other features offered to manipulate the selection as I saw fit. I kept a pattern as I went through editing the spoken word. I kept certain features with the different characters so as to give them a distinct voice from each other. In this process I used such features as envelope, amplitude, chorus (and various other forms of delay), distortion, time/pitch bender and the stretch feature. Of all the features I found the time/pitch bender and the stretch options to be the most fun to play with.

Overall, this was a very good experience for me, as I learned a lot about musical software and what it can do. I hope to build on what I have learned from this experience when I start to work on the final project of the year.

[ends]