Summer Music

This is my first attempt at synchronizing computer-generated audio with human-generated audio and video! It is NOT easy, and the result of synchronizing everything with the tools I have at hand is imperfect.

My day has been dotted with attempts. I started with an iphone video (my ipad needed to charge so that I could use it for lessons), a Zoom audio recorder, bluetooth earbuds, and a computer-generated piano part that I made from a Finale file.

I placed the Zoom recorder right between my computer and my phone, and I pressed "play" on all the devices. I picked up my violin, and after four tries I had a decent recording (which felt pretty good). I loaded the audio files into Audacity, where I found all sorts of delays and lags ebbing and flowing freely through the three minutes of the piece. I guess there might have been some kind of bluetooth delay. I was disappointed.

After teaching a few lessons this afternoon, I tried again. This time I used my iPad and wired headphones, which I stuck into my iPhone. I listened to the piano part by way of Dropbox. Everything went swimmingly except for the fact that I played the piece through the three times with the Zoom recorder on "stand-by" rather than on "record." I gave myself one more attempt, which is what you see and hear here.

This time, after about half an hour of pushing and pulling in Audacity to get everything to start at the same time, I was able to line up the violin part with the piano part. I also gave the recording the ambience being made a larger room, which makes the piano sound more "human" to me.

I used iMovie, a program on my computer that I really don't know how to use properly, to line up the iPad recording with my mixed live/virtual recording. I spent a LONG time trying to figure out how to mute the audio on the iPad video file, and eventually succeeded.

You will, no doubt, notice that about halfway through the video my bow no longer matches the sound. I have no idea how to fix it. I'll leave that kind of thing to digital natives with more sophisticated equipment.

After all this, I still like the piece. And I'm happy to share it here.

The music is on this page of the IMSLP.