For this project, I decided to use the source material of Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. I took the first minute and a half of his lecture, which had lots of interesting material in my opinion. It had applause, laughter, and some key phrases I thought I could emphasize in my composition (i.e. “CT scan,” “this sucks”).

I used two impulse responses. My first was a recording of a staircase in Doherty. I predicted that it would make his voice sound distant and omnipresent.

Two others I tried that ended up not sounding super interesting or good:

• A hit on my drum pad– since it’s basically noise, and not much decay, it didn’t have as interesting of an effect as I wanted to.
• A sawtooth wave at the same pitch as the Young Thug sample– it makes sense that without sufficient noise across the frequency spectrum, only the sound of the frequency really comes through.

My second was the opening few bars of Audemar by Young Thug. In those bars, he has an interesting way of pronouncing “SLATT,” a slang used by Bloods (“Slime Life All The Time”). I wanted to give Pausch a semi-rhythmic context, and figured that using a few bars as an impulse response would give that kind of output.

Here is how my Audacity mixer ended up. The top track is Randy Pausch’s speech convolved with Young Thug, the second one is with the hallway recording. I faded in and out the second track to emphasize the words in his speech I wanted to come through. The bottom track is just Young Thug’s first “SLATT” slowed down to be unrecognizable, as an opening to the track. I think it sounds dope. The rhythm actually came through, which was unexpected, and there was a static drone throughout the piece, because of the synth in the back of Young Thug’s sample convolving with noise. I thought it ended up with a pretty somber mood, which was my goal.