Learning Something New Every Day!

As a teacher, I think it's important to realize that you never stop learning. Yesterday and today I've been working on my group project-presenting similarities and links between opera and hip-hop. I decided to put together a track in Audacity using a hip-hop MP3 ("Rapper's Delight" by RunDMC) and an opera MP3 ("Il Travatore"). I chose to use Audacity because it was a program of which I've had little experience and I wanted to learn more about it. MAN did I learn! I spent 8 hours yesterday working on this track-splicing from both, trying to get the rhythms to match eachother. In any other program, it would have been incredibly easy to establish a loop, getting the rhythms exact and cutting and pasting. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything in Audacity that would allow me to loop an audio clip so I had to do EVERYTHING manually. If I was off by a fraction of a second, my entire track would skip and it would sound awful. Also, whenever I generated more silence on one track, it would add it to all of them-making even more frustration! Though Audacity is good for many things, I would not recommend it for creating samples or splicing. It just takes FOREVER!! My track ended up being OK but I know I could have done better using another program. However, that wasn't the point of this little experiment. I wanted to try something new and experiment with it. I'm proud of myself for getting this far and not giving up!
We were originally going to use this track as something for Kim to dance to during our presentation but we all agreed that it would serve a much better purpose as a soundtrack to an iMovie about opera and hip-hop. Thus a new idea was born and Kim got to work on it! Edgar was ahead of the game putting together his page online and researching information on opera history. He gave us a LOT to work with! During our meeting yesterday, the three of us came up with some GREAT additional ideas that would beef up our project and flex our teacher muscles. I won't disclose it here but it's going to be a LOT of fun!!!