????½

Second assignment this week is B-Flat. I’m supposed to use Audacity to flatten the vocals of a song by one half-step. The song I decided to flatten is Under Cover of Darkness by the Strokes. Here’s the normal version of the song:

I searched around on YouTube and managed to find this version of the song sans vocals:

It sounds a bit off, but it’s the best I could find. Then, I managed to find this version that mostly suppresses the instruments, giving me a vocals-only version:

Once again, not the best quality, but it’ll have to do. Once I loaded them into Audacity, I noticed they weren’t quite in step with each other, so I had to do some fiddling around to get them to sync correctly. I also went through the vocals only version and silenced some of the areas where you could still hear the instruments and where there were no vocals. Once I got them to sound pretty similar to the normal song, I used Audacity’s Change Pitch function to drop the pitch of the vocals by one halfstep. I got this absolutely disgusting audio here:

(Okay so, I had the SoundCloud file embedded here, but it keeps getting removed due to “””copyright violation”””. I’ll try directly uploading it to my blog instead.)

It sounds so terrible and out-of-tune. I didn’t expect just a halfstep pitch shift could mess it up that much. The slowed-down Human Sadness I made the other day actually sounds pretty good, but this sounds so bad oh my god.