Fading Music into Voice

Transcription

1 Fading Music into Voice The process of fading music into voice involves several steps. First, both the music file and the voice file must be in Audacity. Second, we fade out the music over 10 seconds or so. Third, we move the voice track to overlap with a portion of the fading music. Finally, we save the two tracks as one mp3 recording. Opening Music and Voice Files in Audacity In its simplest form, fading music into voice requires two files, a sound file and a voice file. For this exercise, download these two files by right clicking on each link in the Moodle instructions and selecting Save link as.. Choose a convenient place on your computer to keep these two files for easy access. Next, open Audacity and then open (File > Open) SowetoUnderscoreMono.mp3 from the location where you saved it on your computer. Repeat this process (File > Open) to bring IntroESL510.mp3 into Audacity. This process happens so fast it will appear that IntroESL510 has replaced SowetoUnderscoreMono. In fact, Audacity has opened another copy of itself and put IntroESL510 in the first track right in front of the Soweto copy of Audacity. To see the Soweto copy of Audacity, grab the title bar of the IntroESL510 copy of Audacity with you cursor, and drag it down a little. In order to merge the sound and voice files, it is necessary to have both audio files on the same copy of Audacity. Let s start with the Soweto copy of Audacity to keep the music on the top track. Just click on the visible part of the Soweto copy of Audacity to bring it to the front. To create a second track on that copy below the Soweto recording, click Project in the toolbar and then New Audio Track as you see in the screen capture.

2 A click on New Audio Track creates an empty track. Next, copy the IntroESL510 sound track from the other Audacity to the Soweto copy of Audacity. Do this by going to the Intro ESL510 copy of Audacity and left-clicking in the track at the very left edge of the sound wave and dragging the gray highlighter to the end of the sound track. Release the left mouse button and then press CTRL-C to copy the entire sound file. Go back to the Soweto copy of Audacity, click at the left edge of the empty audio track and press CTRL-V to insert the IntroESL510 sound file into that track. The result will look like the next graphic. With both sound files now in the same copy of Audacity, we are ready to take the next step, fading the music from full volume to 0 volume. Fading Out the Music Audacity s normal cursor is the I-beam, visible in the set of six icons in the upper left corner of the program. See the graphic above. The special fading tool is in the same group. It looks like this:

3 The plan is to fade the music out over about 10 seconds. To do this, click on the fading tool. Your cursor turns into two triangles pointing at each other. At the same time, a bold blue line appears above and below the track you are editing. Now carefully position the triangles so that they straddle the top blue line and click every second (on the marks of the ruler) for 10 seconds, as in the next shot. This will put fade anchor dots at these different points so you can adjust the size of the wave from point to point. Now comes the job of gradually pulling the wave form toward the center to mute the sound. Use the same fade tool. Starting at one of the left-most white anchor dots on the top, position the fade tool so that it again straddles the dot. Then left-click and hold the mouse button as you move the cursor toward the middle. Repeat this for each anchor dot to the right, as you see in the next series of shots.

4 At the point where the fade should begin to go to 0, at 10 seconds, you can grab the last anchor dot at the top and stretch it down and to the right until the two sides meet in the middle, as shown. As long as there are no more anchor dots to the right to keep the wave form large, the wave will mute to 0 for the rest of the track, as you see in this shot. Moving the Voice Track into Position With the fade complete, the next step is to move the voice track so that the voice begins as the music ends, overlapping 3-4 seconds.

5 This move can be accomplished with the time-shift tool, represented by one of the collection of icons in the upper left-hand corner. It looks like this: Click this tool. The cursor now turns into the horizontal two-headed arrow. Place the cursor anywhere on the voice track below the music track. Notice it in the red circle. Left-click and hold the mouse button down as you drag the whole track to the right, shifting its timing in relation to the first track. In the next screen shot, the second track has been shifted so that the voice starts about 4 seconds before the music fades to 0. To check that the position of the second track, relative to the first, is about right, change the cursor back to the standard I-beam. (It is gray-shaded in the graphic above.) Now when you move the cursor to the left edge of the music and click, you are ready to listen to the audio file from the beginning. Click on the green Play icon in the tool bar to see if any adjustment is needed in the second track. If so, return to the timeshift tool and move the second track accordingly. All that remains to be done is to save the file as an mp3. When we export to mp3 (File > Export as MP3), the music and voice tracks merge into a single mono track. For a sense of symmetry and closure at the end of a presentation, you can reverse the fading process so that music begins a few seconds before the voice ends and grows to full volume in 10 seconds or so. The music can continue to play at full volume for another seconds before fading out completely.