La Tour Eiffel. La Vie En Rose.

La Tour Eiffel. La Vie en Rose. by sambaz


This entire assignment had me completely stumped. I don’t know much of anything about audio, and can’t even begin to guess what constitutes good audio art. The theme was also a little difficult. It took me a while to think up a concept, and finally settled on something I experienced while in Paris. I wanted to recreate a scene from my first night there. I had had a horrible day, having been awake for forty hours, couldn’t get into the rented apartment until 5PM, and even then, the apartment was 6 flights of stairs up and with no elevator. (Imagine dragging large suitcases up that…) Anyways, we weren’t in the best of moods, and decided to walk to the Eiffel Tower that night. On the way there, we passed some people singing Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. It felt like the perfect embodiment of Paris; Edith Piaf and the Eiffel Tower. So my idea was to re-create that scene.

Using Audacity, I took some audio from some of my favourite French films (Les Chansons d’Amour, Paris, Je T’aime, and Avenue Montaigne) of street and café scenes, mashing them together, and then took the English version of Piaf’s song and sang quietly over top of it. The audio isn’t the best quality, but that is because, Piaf, having sung this song in the 1940s, didn’t use high quality audio equipment. I wanted to recreate that “vintage” sound by lowering the quality of the track, playing the song through my computer speakers and then recording it while it was playing with the computer microphone.

I believe I was successful in recreating the scene and moment I wanted to recreate. I also like how the lowered quality and vintage sound came out.