Audacity is a digital sound editor. You might think of it as a paint program for audio -- just as a paint program enables you to create images with colors, brush strokes, and a variety of special effects, Audacity enables you to "paint" with sound: tones, pieces of songs and voices and miscellaneous noises, or just pure silence.
This assignment will use the recorded greeting from our last assignment and import a sound clip or sound effect, and then mix the greeting with the sound clip or sound effect.
Materials
Procedure
The procedure is a three step process:
Open and edit the sound clip
Import and modify your greeting
Mix both sounds together
Locate a sound clip in .mp3 or .wav format (birds chirping, ocean waves, etc.).
Save this sound clip on your flash drive or on the computer's hard drive
From the Audacity File menu, select File/Open, navigate to the sound and select the sound clip you would like to open
You should now see your audio file on the screen
Cut out the unwanted part of the sound clip recording. You can select and cut any part of the sound clip recording just like you would select and cut text. Select the part you want to delete, then select edit / delete from the File menu. Sounds, especially high quality sounds have large storage requirements, and it is recommended to keep the total length for this assignment to 20 seconds or less.
You may have to work on this process several times to get exactly the part of the sound you would like as the background for your audio greeting.
Once you have the file at an acceptable length, do not close the file, keep it open.
From the File menu, select File / Import / Audio
Select your audio greeting
After completion of the import process, you should now see two audio files on the screen, the 1st audio file containing your voice, the 2nd audio file containing the imported sound (you may have to scroll up/down to see both audio files)
Remember that our audio greeting contains three greetings, the regular greeting and two greetings with special effects applied. We need to remove the two greetings with special effects. Select the two greetings to be removed by using the mouse to highlight the two waves (the timeline above the two waves should be darkened). Select Edit / Delete
Check the volume of both sounds (your greeting and the sound clip), and adjust the volume level with the + / - slider to the left of each sound if necessary (to make sure that your spoken greeting can be heard over your background sound).
We will now mix our two recordings.
Use Select / All from the File menu.
Play the files and check the volume. It often happens that one sound overpowers the other, you can adjust this by using the individual volume sliders to the left of each sound wave. Adjust the volume of both sounds so that both sounds can be heard clearly.
Select the file by using Select / All
Audacity will automatically mix all the sounds into one file, and the voice recording is overlaying the sound clip in the beginning of the file.
Use File / Export as WAV to save your audio file as greeting.wav
Not necessary for this assignment, but interesting to know: Mixing in Audacity is automatic, however, if you want to select only parts of the files or only some of the files (for example if you have 4 sound files and you only want to combine 2), then you have the option to select Tracks / Mix and Render.
©2025 by Gabriele Meiselwitz