Music 220A: Homework 2: Radioplay - A Brief Scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

Audio File:

HW1.wav

Mono Sound Files:

FrontLeft.wav

FrontRight.wav

BackLeft.wav

BackRight.wav

ChucK Files:

4channel.ck - plays 4 mono files

Binaural4.ck

StereoRecorder4.ck

Discussion:

For this assignment, I decided to recreate one of my favorite scenes from Monty Python's The Holy Grail. In this scene, King Arthur encounters two peasant workers with whom he proceeds to argue about politics. It's hard to explain but very funny to watch.

There are 3 speakers total in this piece, for which the point of view is a 3rd party. Speaker 1 is King Arthur, and he is positioned to the right of the listener. Speaker 2 is a woman, who is positioned to the left, and speaker 3 is a man named Dennis who is also to the left. For the 4th speaker, I added some background noise - in this case King Arthur's horse galloping closer and neighing, and rain falling.

In terms of audio editing, it was mainly done in Audacity with the exception of: 1) processing the woman's voice with a PitShift generator in ChucK in order to make it sound higher in frequency and more comical, 2) processing the King and the man's voices with a ResonZ filter - for this I looked at the raw audio file's spectrum in Audacity in order to find the strongest frequency component, then centered my resonant filter at this frequency in order to make it sound more "manly" and deep.

The original clip from the movie can be found here: Movie Scene

All non-recorded audio is from Get-Sounds: get-sounds.com