Nick+Carruth's+Page

= = = I Believe in the Universal language of Music. =



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Ever since middle school I have had a relationship with music that I consider to be unique, and it has had an enormously positive influence on my life.

When I walk around campus, I like to have my headphones in like many other students. But when I’m walking I’m not just thinking about class or what I’m going to do later or did earlier. I am entirely engaged in what I am hearing. For me, when I listen to music I love, it feels like I leave the world and enter into a blissful one of my own. I feel like my senses are heightened and I feel like pure ecstasy. I get a lot of strange looks from people because of the smile I have that I’m unable to hide. To me this is the most amazing experiences life could offer, and I can experience it whenever I put my headphones in. It is incredibly intense, and I think the reason I have this is because I am able to step back and allow myself to entirely engage in the music. I believe that everyone has the ability to experience music like I do.

I think that if people were able to step back from their busy every day lives and let go of constraints such as work, and materialistic concepts that are implanted in our heads by society, even for two minutes we could all experience the joy of music. Of course, we all enjoy and experience music in own ways. The universality of music as a language is amazing. If you find a group of musicians in another country, they may not speak your language, but If you play a B flat blues, they will know what you are talking about. We all appreciate music, but I think that often times in our generation especially, we are not concerned with really engaging in the music and would rather simply jump around to some loud bass.

If nothing else, music can be a tool or therapy that can entirely reduce stress, help us cope more calmly with problems, and be beneficial in one’s day to day life. Because of the joys I have experienced from music, and the ability to step back for a minute and let myself get lost in it, I have learned to take my time and really enjoy what happens in my regular life. This is something we can all do. All you have to do is take a step back, forget, clear your mind and listen.

Notes On the Project: My favorite part of my project was creating the audio. A lot of time went into making the audio clip sound smooth and work with the speech in the background. The first thing I did was create the music. In garage band, I would record a song idea or chord progression on my guitar timed to the metronome on the software. Then I had to create the music to make it sound like a band was backing me up. In order to do this, I laid down looping drum patterns first. Garage band has a number of different instruments that using a keyboard, you can play the notes on them as it records what you play. Every instrument in the audio clip you hear, i created and played exactly what you are hearing (bass, piano, synthesizers, cymbal crashes, sound effects and percussion hits). This is what took me the longest time. I had to come up with and play every line of every instrument that you here in the background. Then I recorded my self soloing over it with the electric guitar. After creating each one of these songs in different garage band projects, I exported each of them to itunes to MP3 format. I then imported all of them into a new garage band project where I was to do my audio. The tricky thing here was getting the songs to fade in and out, sound smoothly together, and not be too quiet or too loud in comparison to my voice. The voice recording took me a few tries, but I connected several different tracks covering up any errors I had made. Laying down the audio underneath just required setting the levels correctly and working with fade in and outs. The audio took quite a bit of work, but of course it is something I really enjoy doing.

The layout of my page took a few hours to figure out as well. First of all, getting things to align correctly was most difficult. However, I figured out how to align pictures and the audio track and posted some details on the discussion board about that. I picked a playful font, because I liked the way it resembled child's crayon writing or something, and real open minded creativeness. I chose to make certain words bigger than the rest. The reason for this is because, I think with what I am trying to write about (getting people to understand the beauty/language of music) there are certain words that stick are important. By doing this, I hope i kind of implanted some of these ideas into the readers head. Stepping back, engaging and getting lost in the music are all important in understanding it. The pictures were all taken at a show my band played a few years ago. The top one and the right hand side one are me, and the left hand side one is my drummer. I thought adding my own pictures would make it more personal and unique. Hope you enjoy!