Eighth grade students were tasked to work with an existing piece of music [public domain (free), downloaded from the Internet] to create their own sound as “Electronica” loops. They honed their skills with Audacity, sound editing/mixing software as they became aware of this genre of music that artists/musicians are creating worldwide in academia and at the workplace.
Electronica includes a wide range of contemporary electronic music designed for a wide range of uses, including foreground listening, some forms of dancing, and background music for other activities; however, unlike electronic dance music, it is not specifically made for dancing. Genres such as techno, drum and bass, down tempo, and ambient are among those encompassed by the umbrella term, entering the American mainstream from “alternative” or “underground” venues during the late 1990s. Since the adoption of this genre in the 1990s to describe more underground music with an electronic aesthetic, elements of modern electronica have been adopted by many popular artists in mainstream music. [Wikipedia]
Some of the sound loops may be incorporated as a part of the Modern Dance teacher’s curriculum for performance venues.
I had a listen to some of the “Electronica Loops” but didn’t hear any sequencing of samples on the ones I heard.
There is a free (primitive) sequencer plug-in for Audacity, (you can download it from here)
I created this with it (from a bit of a Freesound ) …
not sure how in depth into the electornica music genre you go, but i recently started writing. there’s a program i’ve been using for about 6 months now, called MadTracker. (@ Trebor: … MadTracker wasn’t on that list, but it’s similar to FastTracker)
tracking can be time consuming, but i think it works very nicely with audacity. i make the “guts” of my music with the tracker, then fine tune and add things to it in audacity. i find audacity to be a fantastic finishing tool.
keep those kids learning. exposing them to electronica is a fantastic way to open minds
Even though the free version of Madtracker apparently does not allow you to save the track,
I suppose it would be possible to record the track it produced using Audacity. http://audacityteam.org/help/faq?s=recording&i=streaming
[ Although I suspect you couldn’t save your work as a project you could continue later ]
actually it does. you can’t play them in anything else besides madtracker, unless they’re exported. i save my stuff to work on it later, and once i’m done, export into an ogg vorbis file, which is what i bring up in audacity to polish and make my final production
Ogg Vorbis is a lossy codec, that means it “damages” the show for reducing the file size. Lossy formats are good for final delivery, specially if you’re going to share it on the internet, because of its reduced file size, but in the middle stages of audio processing you should always use lossless formats such as WAV or FLAC.
keep those kids learning. exposing them to electronica is a fantastic way to open minds
thanks! … kinda new to audio processing itself