AIVP Laboratory Session 1

Task 1

The trough of this wave starts at 07.699s and the crest peaks at 07.704s within this very short period of 0.005s or a two hundredth of a second the amplitude rises gradually from -0.25dB to 0.25dB at a shallow pace.
The size of the crest is roughly the opposite of the size of the trough beforehand this is an example of particles following the motion of earlier particles in the medium.
Task 2
My original wave was a walking pace hip hop drum beat using a snare and bass drum with a tambourine struck occasionally.
Perfect for adding layers of instruments onto.

I experimented by adding in an echo with a delay factor of 0.5 this transformed the slow hip hop beat and made it sound like rapid timpani drums because the echoing snare made it seem twice as fast. The tambourine seemed like it was being shaken twice rather than struck once because you were hearing the echo.
Overall I think that the echo overpowers the free space left to add layers of instruments onto making it ill advised to do so.
Task 3

• Plot Spectrum takes the selected audio (which is a set of sound pressure values at points in time) and converts it to a graph of frequencies (the horizontal scale in Hz) against amplitudes (the vertical scale in dB).
• The frequencies can be displayed on a linear scale (default, which gives equal width to each increment on the scale) or on a logarithmic scale. The log scale gives greater display width to low frequencies. Linear view can be useful to show harmonics (a component frequency of the sound that is a whole number multiple of the fundamental frequency).
• A decibel is a unit used to measure the intensity of a sound or the power level of an electrical signal by comparing it with a given level on a logarithmic scale.
• In general use a decibel is a degree of loudness.

Task 4

With reverb turned on the echo of each each drum beat slowly fades out it sounds like drums are being played in a gym hall rather than a recording studio, this process is known as damping because the sound is simulated as being absorbed by walls, floor, ceiling and air.

I used a much small room reverb preset to compare to my large "gym hall" like previous one. Each drum beat after being struck fades out for a split second before bouncing back louder again, then fades then bounces back repeatedly until it fades out. this is to simulate the claustrophobic space the sound is trapped in and cannot escape so it keeps bouncing off of the walls and ceilings like a squash ball finding it difficult to fade out gradually.

Task 5

In audacity I experimented and found out you can:

• Record live audio through a microphone or mixer.
• Change the pitch without altering the tempo (or vice-versa).
• Adjust volume with Compressor, Amplify, Normalize, Fade In/Fade Out and Adjustable Fade effects.
• Use spectrogram view modes for visualizing frequencies.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/plot_spectrum.html