Audacity Forum

I wanted to know if there is a way i can speed up one of my recordings to make it sound like the alvin and chipmunk voices for example when i turn up the playback speed on a recording and press play the recording is fast and sounds like tiny voices. i wanted to keep it this way so i could save it as a mp3(export using lame). when i save the recording with playback turned up the recording is played back to its normal speed.please give specific directions.thanks

The reason nobody's jumped on this is we can't figure out what you're trying to do.

You can use Audacity tools to make the work sound higher but keep the same show length, sound semi-normal but make the show shorter, or simulate speeding up a tape. In all these conditions you can make a very nice MP3 that will sound chipmonky no matter where you play it. To bring it back down, you'll have to run it through Audacity or some other production program again.

That's assuming all the tools work perfectly and they don't. If you push work faster or higher, it won't come back down in the same quality it left. You can't really do that with tape, either. Quality suffers.

MP3 tools compress assuming all the tonal pitches and important sounds in the show are where they should be. If they're not, you could get unexpected results.

Koz

kozikowski wrote:The reason nobody's jumped on this is we can't figure out what you're trying to do.

I'm feeling lucky so I'll have a guess

My guess is that you (brelize ) have tried speeding up the playback using the "playback speed" slider next to the green arrow. That control does not actually change the data in the track at all, it just changes how fast it plays back at the time that it is adjusted. (It is intended for things such as temporarily slowing down a recording to assist people who are transcribing). The effect that you want is called "Change Speed" and is in the "Effect" menu. The track must be selected in order to apply the effect.

I think Brelize my be trying to do something I want to do: have one track at normal speed & another at "chipmunk" speed. Ross Bragdasarian recorded himself (on tape, I presume) as himself at normal speed and as the C's at low speed, so on playback he sounds normal and the guys sound like, well, chipmunks. Easy to do on a multi-track, multi-speed tape deck, but I haven't yet worked out how to do it on Audacity. Processing the track to change pitch by an octave would work, but I want to compare it with the "tape" method to see which gives better sound quality.

Les Paul used the same technique (he INVENTED it, for heaven's sake!) with his guitar and Mary Ford's vocals. I'm nowhere near the same league as Les (or Mary, for that matter), but I want to have a go. Any suggestions?

You can get that effect using "Change Speed" which is in the Effect menu.

Kasper wrote:Les Paul used the same technique (he INVENTED it, for heaven's sake!)

Whilst it is true that Les Paul was one of the very early adopters of the new recording technology, the technique of changing the playback speed was also being used at that time by what was to become "Musique Concrete" (Pierre Schaeffer et al). Multi-track recording had already been around since the early 1920s, though back then recordings were made optically on film. Les Paul was nevertheless highly influential and played a significant role in the development of multi-track magnetic tape recorders in the 1950s, and was probably the first person to make commercial recordings using asynchronous mult-track recordings on magnetic tape. I guess it must have been an incredibly exciting time for these pioneers of modern music - Experimental music had been bursting at the seams, and the post war technological advances now provided exciting new tools that opened up a world of new possibilities.