Using Audacity
First thing first: Isn’t this a writing class?? Why the heck are we learning about audio editing?!?
Remember that writing is a form of technology already. If writing helps us to communicate thoughts, feelings, questions, desires, and ideas, there has to be some form in which those intangible things take shape. At some point, the written alphabet developed as one tool for that very purpose. Pencils and pens were like revolutions of personal technology: suddenly anyone could “write” their thoughts down and communicate them to someone else. Convenient technology! Later would come typewriters and word processors.
If we call “writing” or “composition” any technological means of communicating ideas, then other media (audio, video, web) are simply other forms of giving tangible shape to the intangible. So, we’re not going to artifically limit writing to print (via word processor) formats. That distinction is not only fake, but it’s not very productive in the digital age.
But writing with audio or video isn’t easier than writing with print/type. All the same considerations are still in play:
- organization
- editing
- rhetorical goals
- coherence
- style
- etc.
So, with that introduction, let’s get started!
Using Audacity is not too hard. Much of what you’ll want to do can be handled through just a few highlights and clicks. One of the first things you’ll do is to import your audio. You probably have several pieces of sound (interviews, songs, sounds, etc.) that you want to work with. You can either work with it all at once, or you can break it into smaller projects.
I’ll show you how I created this piece.
I’m going to pretend like I’m just creating a short clip. The advantage of doing projects in small blocks is that there’s less chance for confusion while editing. You can also add your small tracks to one big track at the end (if, for example, you’re trying to create one long audio piece).
Step 1: Import Audio (under “Project”)
You’ll now end up with a visual representation of your sound along one time track. This is your sound in waves. You’re now ready to edit.
Step 2: Highlight, cut/split
Chances are good that you don’t want every single minute of this audio, and you also probably don’t want it in this order. Let’s say that I just want to use the first 30 seconds of a five-minute song. I will just highlight the remaining time that I don’t want, and then I’ll choose “cut.”
But let’s say that I want to split up various parts of one long audio piece. Here you have many options. Perhaps the easiest is to highlight the part you want to split from the audio. [See those six boxes in the utmost lefthand corner? The selection tool is the first one. It looks like a capital “I.”] Now choose “split.”
What happens? The part you highlighted will automatically appear in a new track. You can do this for as many parts as you like.
WAIT! I have a lot of different audio tracks! What does that mean?
In Audacity, the timeline runs the whole length of the screen. Whenever tracks are layered on top of one another, they will play at the same time. This is how you can add many sounds on top of each other: background music, interviews, narration, ambient sounds, etc. But you can also move tracks so that they are not playing right on top of each other. Use the “time-selection” tool that looks like a two-way arrow.
Final step: export. MP3 is the choice format (because it’s smaller), but iTunes can convert WAV files into MP3.
