I learned to do something amazing and remarkable last weekend.<\/p>\n
I figured out how to use Audacity<\/a> to create OOPS music tracks.<\/p>\n OOPS? you say. What’s that? you ask.<\/p>\n OOPS stands for “Out of Phase Stereo.” It’s a way of flipping one channel of a stereo music track, to create a new, third stereo music track.<\/p>\n Beatlesologists have been using OOPS to find new and unusual things in Beatles songs for forty years.<\/p>\n I’d never really considered messing about with OOPS stereo myself, but when reading an article online I decided, “Hey, I can try that for myself.”<\/p>\n It’s like a ten-second process in Audacity.<\/p>\n 1) Drag your mp3 file into Audacity’s editing window. Done.<\/p>\n At first I tried a couple of Beatles songs. Sometimes vocals drop out. Sometimes the backing instrumentation takes on a strange, almost drug-like effect. Often, vocals are pushed far back into the mix, but sometimes the vocals are brought to the fore and the instrumentation drops away. <\/p>\n Coldplay’s “Reign of Love” turns into a kind of piano-dirge, with an occasional whispering by Chris Martin. Elbow’s “The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver” sounds unearthly, like something that belongs in 2001<\/i>. Idlewild’s “Love Steals Us From Loneliness” leaves mainly only the rhythm guitar.<\/p>\n It’s a time waster. It’s so easy<\/i> to drag an mp3 file into Audacity, do the jiggery pokery, and listen to what comes out.<\/p>\n Ooh, I know! Let me try some Bob Dylan! Oh, wow, that’s just… wow. It’s even more incoherent than Bob Dylan usually<\/i> is.<\/p>\n Seriously, don’t try this at home kids. You won’t know when you’ll stop! \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I learned to do something amazing and remarkable last weekend. I figured out how to use Audacity to create OOPS music tracks. OOPS? you say. What’s that? you ask. OOPS stands for “Out of Phase Stereo.” It’s a way of flipping one channel of a stereo music track, to create a new, third stereo musicContinue reading “On the Ultimate Time Waster”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[629,4098],"class_list":["post-1957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-audacity","tag-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n2) Split the stereo track.
\n3) Highlight one of the two stereo channels.
\n4) Invert that stereo channel (Effect -> Invert)
\n5) Turn both stereo channel into mono.<\/p>\n