Web Expressions – Sound Lab

You will be messing with Sound for this lab! w00t! As I mentioned before, we will be using WavePad to edit sound. The program is pretty cool, and best of all, its Free! In this lab you will learn some basic concepts about audio as well as get a chance to play around with some sounds to see how it works first hand.

Here’s the prep work:

1. Open WavePad (You can find it by clicking Start > All Programs > Classes > Web Expressions > WavePad)
2. Click the Help > Help Contents menu.
3. Click on General Audio Concepts (Samples, Channels etc..)
4. Read it. This is key to understanding what we are doing in this lab

Here’s the Audio Editing Exercise:
Use WavePad to edit an audio clip.

1. Find and download a sound file. Get one from The Daily Wav (save it to your M:Drive in your Home directory)
2. Open the sound file in WavePad
3. You should now see a wave pattern in WavePad. Click play (at the bottom of WavePad) to play the sound file.
4. Now its time to fiddle with effects! Click the Effects menu in WavePad and check out what you can do. Play around with it. As you add effects to the sound file, keep track of what effect your used and what the settings were in that effect. (you will be blogging this)
   • When adding effects, highlight different parts of the wave (by clicking and dragging on the wave) and then adding the effect. This will allow you to add different effects to different parts of the sound file
5. For this assignment, you need to add at least 5 effects to the sound file! (one of which must be a Simple Speed and Pitch Change)
6. Once you have the effects that you like on the sound file, save the file 3 times as a .wav format using different qualities.
   1. Save the first version as CD quality (44,100/16bit)
   2. Save the second version as Radio quality (22,050/8bit)
   3. Save the third version as Telephone quality (11,025/8bit)
7. Now open the 3 audio files that you created and listen to the difference in quality. Also, look at the size of the files and note the relations of file size to sound quality.
8. Blog your sounds. Use http://oz.plymouth.edu/~your_username/folder/file.wave Your blog should have:
   • a link to the original sound file
   • A list of the effects you applied to the sound file
   • a link to the CD quality sound file
   • a link to the Radio quality sound file
   • a link to the Telephone quality sound file
   • Write a brief summary of the relation between sound quality and filesize
9. Repeat steps 1 through 8 with a different sound file

If you have an urge to add sound to your website, refer to this tutorial.

(Lab compliments of Dee Brown)