{"id":260825,"date":"2013-08-27T12:58:13","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T12:58:13","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-08-27T12:58:13","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T12:58:13","slug":"how-to-make-your-own-slow-jams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/08\/27\/how-to-make-your-own-slow-jams\/","title":{"rendered":"How to make your own slow jams"},"content":{"rendered":"

jkottke<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

A couple of weeks ago, a slowed-down version of Dolly Parton\u2019s classic ballad \u201cJolene\u201d went viral. A lot of people who heard it loved it, a few people didn\u2019t, but everyone seemed to agree that it was like listening to either an entirely new song or the same song again for the first time. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

One of the things that\u2019s eerie about this is that if you listen closely, everything is just a little<\/em> bit out of tune. There\u2019s conflicting information about exactly how much the track has been slowed. Some people have said that it\u2019s simulating a 45 RPM record played at 33\u00a01\/3, which is certainly the most common way people who lived with record players heard popular songs at slower speeds. But that would actually be quite a bit slower and lower than this. <\/p>\n

The other figure I\u2019ve seen (forgive me for not citing everything, I\u2019m typing as fast as I can) is \u201cJolene\u201d has been slowed by 17 percent, which sounds about right and would explain why all the notes seem just a little bit sharp. Here\u2019s the formula for slowing or speeding up a recording to shift the pitch<\/a> but generally stay in tune:<\/p>\n

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(2 ^ (semitones change\/12) – 1) *100 = Percent Change<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So \u2014 as one does when procrastinating from remunerative work \u2014 I made an Excel spreadsheet. <\/p>\n

If you want to drop two semitones, you shift the speed down by 12.2462 percent; drop three, you shift by 18.9207 percent, which significantly changes the track. To imitate a 45 RPM record played at 33\u00a01\/3, that\u2019s about 25.926, but very few records still sound like something a person actually made at this speed. All of these slowdowns are interesting, even the ones that don\u2019t work. <\/p>\n

You can do all of them in the free\/open-source audio processing app Audacity<\/a>; it\u2019s very fast and very easy. (If you want to get freaky, you can also use Audacity to change pitch without changing tempo, or vice versa, or to start out slow and go fast, and all manner of lesser and greater perversity.)<\/p>\n

But after messing with Audacity for longer than was strictly necessary, I can tell you that some songs and transformations work out better than others, and they tend to be those that share a lot of the same characteristics as Jolene: <\/p>\n