Location of this Walkthrough: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df4f25rh_184gvmrj9cf
Sound Editing (Audacity) for Approaches
Sound Recording Basics:
1. Use the best equipment you can get your hands on
2. Record digitally (converting from analog is an extra step, and not so easy)
3. I recommend you record just your targeted sound (don't record everything all the time, this will make your editing easier)
4. If a sound is a good sound, record it a few times.
5. Back up your sound files on separate devices
6. Edit copies, not the originals
7. The lavalier mic has a short range, so be close to the subject when recording
8. Use the highest fidelity settings to record (i.e. record .wav and .aiff, not .mp3, more info )
Audacity:
Editing Tools
Sound Editing in Audacity
1. Downloading: Free sound editor and recorder, download for macs and windows
2. Edit copies of your files, keep the originals
3. Importing:
File Menu, import, then browse for your file (later used to export your .wav)
4. Tools:
Selection Tool 
- you'll use this a lot
Envelope Tool 
- use this to adjust the volume, fade in, fade out
Zoom Tool 
- use this to view the wave form close up, control click to zoom back out
Draw Tool 
- for editing wave forms (skipped in this tutorial)
Timeshift Tool 
- for sliding tracks left or right (skipped in this tutorial)
(for this project avoid the pencil, and the multi-tool)
5. Effects
- fade in
- fade out (less control than envelope tool)
- compression (use to control loud noises)
Other:
8. Stereo to Mono
9. Layering Tracks
10. Rate= Keep rate the same (44.1 Khz std).
Keep the bit depth the same (i.e. 16 bit)
Exporting:
Approaches to Media Studies, Fall 2007 Sound Object Project (Tom Porcello)
Your project is to create an auditory exploration of human intervention in a natural or built space—literally, to take the listener on a walk through a space in such a way that s/he can hear how that space shapes and is shaped by human artifacts and actions. Human intervention can be broadly construed to include speech, singing, music, the noise of machines, of human social activity, of work, play, or relaxation; artifacts can include technologies, commodities, but also architectural features. But these are non-exclusionary categories.
Your sound object will be part documentation and part aesthetic intervention. You will need to record the raw materials for your project, but you will need equally to craft them into a sound object that tells a story, has a trajectory, and dramatizes the sound of sounds. You may not, however, intervene with a voice-over that tells this story. Nor may you use a space located on the Vassar College campus.
Imagine, for a moment, that you had chosen Skinner Hall of Music as the place represented by your sound object. Your project might guide the listener through the transition from the outdoors into the empty Hall, and then position the listener as earwitness to an ensemble rehearsal. You might dramatize the difference between being on stage and in the audience. You might wish to change the listener’s point of audition from spectator to performer to ensemble director. You might present the sound from unusual parts of the Hall (beneath seats, backstage), to explore how sounds sound when re-sounding in places not designed (itself a human intervention) for acoustic perfection. You might highlight the social activities that frame the rehearsal, that turn the stage into a space of collaborative sonico-musical activity.
Imagine for a moment that you choose the Hudson River as the place to be represented by your sound object. You may wish to guide the listener from a remote area (Norrie State Park in Staatsburg) to the Mid-Hudson Bridge, exploring the sounds of commerce (barge traffic), leisure (pleasure boaters, people fishing at Wayras Park), recreation (crew practice, music from a shoreline bar), nature (waves at the shore, seagulls), nature-human intersections (waves after a barge passes through). You may wish to take the listener there at different times of day to hear the soundscape shift from morning to night. Or contrast how it sounds on a rainy or windy day with a more placid day.
Imagine for a moment that you have chosen a Manhattan subway platform as the space to be represented by your sound object. You may wish to focus on figure-ground relationships between the din of multiple voices and the sudden presence of an individual voice. You may wish to explore the sound of silence (if any) in this underground cavity, and juxtapose it with the deafening roar of the trains. You may contrast the clack of wheels and the squeal of brakes with the saxophone riff of a subway musician or the calls of a vendor. You may take the listener on a journey from midtown to the end of the line, or, as with the river, from morning to night.