For my final piece of media to be used in the final project, I have created an audio clip. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find “pretend to be a former president and sing karaoke” in the audio assignment repository. My goal was to close out ds106 with something light and fun, so I figured having a former President perform karaoke would cover that.

The process of making this audio clip was a three step process. First, I chose Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band as my karaoke song. I then used clipconverter to create an mp3 file of the song, and then imported it into Audacity. Next, I scoured through freesound.org to find an audio clip that could be used as background noise for the bar. I ultimately chose this clip, as it is subtle enough that it won’t overwhelm the rest of the audio, and is also realistic sounding.I imported that clip into Audacity as well. Next, I started messing around with effects on my voice recording to try and achieve the effect of speaking through a microphone. Ultimately, using the echo effect worked best. Here is a screenshot of the setting I chose.

Once I got to this point, the rest of the work was recording myself singing in my best Abe voice, and making sure the sound levels of the three tracks all complemented each other. I had to pretend not to know the words, and tried to fumble over words as much as I could, as I figure a man from the 19th century might have a bit of trouble singing karaoke for the first time.

Here is a screenshot of my final workspace.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with this assignment. I hope you enjoy!